Why wouldn’t they?

It’s not like they face any consequences for being accessory to fraud. Laws are for poor people.

Money. Criminals and immoral people pay good money to show these ads. At least for Facebook, a court case regarding identity fraud has established that they knew quite well which ads were fishy, so they just charged those advertisers more. If I remember correctly, that amounted to about 10% of Facebook’s revenue. It will be a similar case for Google, I assume. Sketchy ads pay too well to remove all of them and laws make it so the platform is only liable if they don’t take it down after receiving notice of every single sketchy ad. Google, Facebook, and the others are all well near monopoly and built deep moats, so they don’t really have to fear losing customers, because there’s no simple alternative.

Huh? Not for me. I kicked the big G out with DNS.

Me too, just fuck it all to hell. It’s nice not to have mobile apps tracking me either.

This and also the G sites not being displayed.

Right, but simply staying away from their websites doesn’t really solve the problem. You can ditch Google all you want but you won’t get away from their tracking on just about every third party app and website — they even load scripts on (US) government websites.

#1 money/greed
#2 ineffective government

With enough money and greed, you can make a very ineffective government.

Because like all ad companies, Google gives way less of a shit if the ads are malicious than they do there being lots of ads displayed.

Before I put adblockers on everything, I was served an ad for a stupid mobile shooter game, either on YouTube or Facebook, that started with a real life hunter shooting a coyote in the neck, which made it cry out in pain and tumble down a hill.

Now as a matter of sanity, I block all ads. If they can’t keep crap like that from being advertised, then fuck off.

I have personalized ads turned of in YouTube and it seems half the ads are for gambling as of late.

Wow. That really stinks for gambling addicts. It’s like they can’t get away from it. A lot of YouTube channels advertise gambling apps too.

If you’re seeing ads on YouTube, you’re doing it wrong.

I find this kind of response insufferable. It shifts the conversation from a systems critique to personal responsibility. You could have posted this in response the OP, and it would be equally on point and useless.

Critique the system all you like. The system doesn’t care. Call it ‘insufferable’ if you like, but ads are more insufferable. If there’s a way to solve the problem myself without waiting until some corporate overlord deigns to change anything, I’ll do that every time.

I’ll do that every time.

Not everyone will though. It’s not because they’re not as principled as you are, maybe they just lack the know-how or time.

Sharing the how and why would be more helpful - otherwise you’re just coming off as holier-than-thou. And no one wants to engage with that.

Your only point here though is “I’m so great, you suck” which frankly doesn’t help anyone. Maybe provide them some tips.

Because that makes them money. Next question.

It’s for a church. NEXT.

(If you’ve never seen it)

An all-time classic. You can hear the lead clanking in their bloodstream

Always gets a chuckle out of me

Always a good read.

In that screenshot alone they had offers for enough space to handle 18 of the 20 people. But they just have to be an asshole about it.

I honestly always believed that it was a church busy body that was doing this. She probably has a small track record of resolving issues like this in the past and it just went straight to her head.

That was my knee jerk reaction, but then I thought,“Hey, don’t be one of those people that only read the headlines and react to the click bait!” So I opened it and read it. Yep, should have just stuck with that first reaction and saved myself 30 seconds. Money. It’s always money.

There's a suprisingly large number of people who I have had to tell that Google sells ad space. They're a digital billboard company but with the ability to target and tailor that ad space to the people who's eyes they want to put it in front of. People just don't know or care or both.

Correct, it’s always that answer for ‘why is company x doing’

Because Google’s corporate philosophy is “Anything for a buck” which is of course quite different from the “Dont Be Evil” they started with…

Google operated by “don’t be evil” right up until they merged with Double Click. That merger itself forcibly removed the “don’t.”

Because the US refuses to regulate tech

But why won’t any other country do it either? Or are these ads only displaying to US IP addresses?

Because the US is aggressive towards countries that try. Also the companies are so large that they can exclude an entire country from their services.

A smaller country can take Facebook to court and might get a settlement but only a us court can truely punish them. With jail, breaking them up, law changes affecting their main customer base etc.

Exactly. Case in point: https://lemmy.zip/post/71167170

even if they did try to regulate this it wouldn’t go away unless the regulations were completely overhanded. Those ads aren’t ran by reputable buisness so thry probably wouldn’t be affected by getting banned anyways.

If google can’t serve ads responsibly to the entire world then then need to limit their ad network to a uaerbase that they can manage. Thats considered extremely hostile in current age but I think its reasonable.

I just reported an ad that used a national newspaper name and logo to send you to a fake Amazon page that uses Amazon name and logo. Google’s response: “We decided not to take this ad down. We found that the ad doesn’t go against Google’s policies”

Well yeah , I mean if you consider that Google’s policy is “Be Evil”, then everything’s fine.

They don’t change… I had the same problem some 5 years ago. There was an ad for olive oil using the logo of a famous supermarket around here, and a fairly similar website to the supermarket one. I reported that ad 5 times, got the same “this ad does not violate Google’s policies” response each time. Until my mother clicked on it and was scammed out of her money.

I came to the conclusion that the only solution was to be done with google, I started using nextDNS in my entire network, changed all standard search for duckduckgo, and installed ad block all over.

I wish someone would make a website like a wall of shame, “ads we reported to Google and Google tough were fine”

I’ve seen my niece and her friends get incredibly sexual ads on their YT before. Taught them both how to install adblock even on an iPhone and managed to make them not see that shit anymore. Mind you, my niece and her friends are FOURTEEN!

I felt like such an adult when they were getting excited that Fandom didn’t have ads anymore when I showed them what a DNS sinkhole is. This is what it means to be an adult. To use your wisdom to help the new generation navigate theirs.

That’s the best kind of praxis, because it will (hopefully) outlive you.

Is it really praxis tho? Like it is just being a good guardian to my niece and her friends. I get it to an extent that ‘ads are the price you pay for using a service for free’ but to what end? Google is a massive company and should vet the advertisements they allow a lot more.

The fact children are getting highly sexual ads is a failure on their part and I see blocking ads as a fair reprisal to them until they can sort themselves out. It’s my civil disobedience as a consumer. Like especially these days with how massively invasive ads have become.

My view is that 15 years ago (maybe longer) “ads are the price you pay” was valid. They weren’t tracking everything you do… yet. They’ve gone too far and until they stop there’s no reason for you play by the rules either.

If it were me in their place I could imagine your actions being impactful, and inspiring further action or thought. At that age I was very interested in going against the grain. It was a different time, but not too long ago. Really no one wants to see ads, for sure, so it’s still a win, even if the anti-surveillance ad message is not of interest, you’ve still helped get rid of not just the annoyance but the malicious vector of a grab bag of random liabilities - modern digital ads.

Two thoughts :

1. This particular example of adversarial advertising by Google is directly targeting a flaw in a competitor’s (Apple) OS
2. The author asks why Google aren’t using their AI tools to combat these, which is a fair question. Surely they are using AI, of course, but no chance in hell are they using the same Gemini the public gets. It’s going to be tailored to their end goals, not the public-facing model the author screenshotted.

This is really only an issue if you browse the WWW without adblock.

And it seems that this guy does it on a mobile device, which is the second mistake.

Twice I have tried to report this one, here’s their response:

Here’s what we found

We decided not to take this ad down. **We found that the ad doesn’t go against Google’s policies,** which prohibit certain content and practices that we believe to be harmful to users and the overall online ecosystem.

If it wasn’t for youtube and my 20 year old gmail account i wouldn’t be using anything from them

Amazing how many people rather argue away the obvious using Hanlon’s Razor, than face reality. Let’s adhere to a much better reasoning tool, “allways follow the money!”

Should we try to coin the term:

“Beer’s Razor”

The purpose of a system is what it does…

en.wikipedia.org/…/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha…

Are any of the ads on social media not dodgy? I opened YT without adblock not so long ago and was immediately served ads for scam product from China. Facebook was also full of ads that were obvious scams.

My mom got served a virus from front page of Google. Living without adblock was always bad, nothing changed.

Google made click money so its still up. It has nothing to do with AI, though thats a nice scapegoat: “ its not the AI! Look what it gave me as a response!”. Meanwhile the ad service AI doesnt give an f what this dude has to say because the money is better and this dude sounds like he pays for their AI so why would they care. He’s now a dissatisfied walking talking google ad.

If I were in government, I would make Google liable for any ad they show. They took money for that ad, therefore they are responsible for the content of that ad.

Lacking regulations that are genuinely enforced, they will only put a brick on the gas pedal in response to any resistance.

thought I had read doggy ads for a second

I recommend everyone tonuse an adblock and switch off of big tech products because fuck them

sponsored / ˈspɒnsəd /

adjective

A fraudulent website or application that appears while using Google services