eevee 🦊you ever think about how google will put fake download links to malware above real search results, for money
there's not really any excuse for this at all but they just do it and everyone sort of accepts it
Glyph@eevee in fairness it's very, very hard not to do this. apple famously has a whole apparatus which (mostly) is just to make sure this doesn't happen on the app store, and everybody complains about it constantly and hates that it slows down deployments so much. one could argue that they could do it better but it is an incredibly difficult problem. (a public pledge that they'd donate any retroactively discovered malvertising revenue to some charity would be nice, though)
@eevee "If I were serving 30 billion ad impressions per day I would simply make sure none of them are links to malware" is a lot easier said than done
@glyph sure, but from the other end: their entire business model is "get paid to show people something other than what they were looking for", which is like christmas for anyone trying to peddle any kind of garbage, and the direct immediate impact is on end users and not google
in fact the direct impact is on /people who click the ads/! let that marinate for a second
@eevee yeah I should not have stipulated it in such a way that assumes that their business model *necessarily* ought to be allowed exactly as-is. a more sensible regulatory regime would be to have some kind of real punitive liability for these sorts of things, so that there would be some sense of fairness for folks who were harmed. and if you can't vet your ads and you can't pay the restitution, maybe you just can't operate at that scale
@eevee I can't help but see this as *mostly* a collective failure of society rather than google specifically. the government mostly just doesn't do its job (in the US) or does it very poorly without much thought to unintended consequences (in Europe)
@eevee like after the prop 22 debacle, I even got more sympathetic to Uber. I know they poured a ton of money into deceptive advertising to pass it, they're not off the hook, but if we cannot even get societal consensus that "someone who works for you exclusively full-time and is paid a rate that you decide is your employee" then it's hard to imagine that corporations will *self*-regulate, either.