Dr. Fancypants, Esq.
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
this isn't something that's improved by computer people switching to a different search engine — you were probably using an ad blocker anyway and were not the target audience
GFD@eevee yeah, being possible to subvert doesn’t mean 99% of people know how to.
anecdote: i run DNS‐level adblock on my router, and it happens more often than you might expect that people complain about not being able to click on Google search results when they’re on my Wi‐Fi. most of my attempts to explain why this is happening are met with a strong aversion to security over convenience in any form. (tough luck for them though, it’s my network and i’ll run it how i want.)
anecdote: i run DNS‐level adblock on my router, and it happens more often than you might expect that people complain about not being able to click on Google search results when they’re on my Wi‐Fi. most of my attempts to explain why this is happening are met with a strong aversion to security over convenience in any form. (tough luck for them though, it’s my network and i’ll run it how i want.)
Reid@eevee To be fair, they HAVE gotten sued for manipulating results in the past, and they claimed in court that they were TRYING to remove bad things like this. Courts told them they were doing wrong. So I agree with you however keep in mind they have a devil on BOTH ends.
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.
Erica "digifox" Kovac 🌐⚛️⚡@eevee report those ads, seriously
Steve@eevee Google had ONE JOB. Search is the most important part of the web. And they fucked it up in every imaginable way. Textbook case of late capitalism bullshit.
realstable@eevee tru point but tough solution unfortunately, maybe ChatGPT can fix it?
Piko Starsider 
@eevee We can consider an ad blocker a security tool...
Ian Ridgwell@eevee Google is not your friend.