Mastodawn

Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

In 1998, two Stanford kids published a paper in *Computer Networks*: "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," in which they wrote, "Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers."

https://research.google/pubs/pub334/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

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The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – Google Research

Google Research

Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

The co-authors were Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, and the "large-scale hypertextual web search-engine" they were describing was their new project, which they called "#Google." They were 100% correct - prescient, even!

On Wednesday night, a friend came over to watch some TV with us. We ordered out. We got scammed. We searched for a great local Thai place we like called Kiin and clicked a sponsored link for a #Wix site called "Kiinthaila.com."

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Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

We should have clicked the third link down (kiinthaiburbank.com).

We got scammed. The Wix site was a lookalike for Kiin Thai, which marked up their prices by 15% and relayed the order to our local, mom-and-pop, one-branch restaurant. The restaurant knew it, too - they called us and told us they were canceling the order, and said we could still come get our food, but we'd have to call Amex to reverse the charge.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

As it turned out, the scammers double-billed us. I called Amex, who advised us to call back in a couple days when the charge posted to cancel it - in other words, they were treating it as a regular customer dispute, and not a systemic, widespread fraud (there's no way this scammer is just doing this for one restaurant).

In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor hassle, but boy, it's haunting to watch the quarter-century old prophecy of Brin and Page coming true.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

Search Google for carpenters, plumbers, gas-stations, locksmiths, concert tickets, entry visas, jobs at the US Post Office or (not making this up) tech support for Google products, and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it's several of the top ads.

This kind of "intermediation" business is actually revered in business-schools.

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As Douglas Rushkoff has written, the modern business wisdom reveres #GoingMeta - not doing anything useful, but rather, creating a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who want to pay for those things, and squatting there, collecting rent:

https://rushkoff.medium.com/going-meta-d42c6a09225e

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Going Meta - Douglas Rushkoff - Medium

While Mark Zuckerberg was sitting down to talk with Joe Rogan last week, I was in a studio recording the audio version of my upcoming book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech…

Medium

Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

It's the ultimate #PassiveIncome #RiseAndGrind #SideHustle: It wouldn't surprised me in the least to discover a whole festering nest of creeps on Tiktok talking about how they pay #MechanicalTurks to produce these lookalike sites at scale.

This mindset is so pervasive that people running companies with billions in revenue and massive hoards of venture capital run *exactly* the same scam.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

During lockdown, companies like Doordash, Grubhub and Uber Eats stood up predatory lookalike websites for local restaurants, without their consent, and played #MonsterInTheMiddle, tricking diners into ordering through them:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-are-beautiful/#man-in-the-middle

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Pluralistic: 19 Sep 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

These delivery app companies were playing a classic #enshittification game: first they directed surpluses to customers to lock them in (heavily discounting food), then they directed surplus to restaurants (preferential search results, free delivery, low commissions) - then, having locked in both consumers and producers, they harvested the surplus for themselves.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

Today, delivery apps charge massive premiums to both eaters and restaurants, load up every order with junk fees, and clone the most successful restaurants out of #GhostKitchens - shipping containers in parking lots crammed with low-waged workers cranking out orders for 15 different fake "virtual restaurants":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/01/autophagic-buckeyes/#subsidized-autophagia

Delivery apps speedran the enshittification cycle, but Google took a slower path to get there.

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Pluralistic: 01 Dec 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

The company has locked in billions of users (e.g. by paying billions to be the default search on Safari and Firefox and using legal bullying to block third party Android device-makers from pre-installing browsers other than Chrome). For years, it's been leveraging our lock-in to prey on small businesses, getting them to set up Google Business Profiles.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

These profiles are supposed to help Google distinguish between real sellers and scammers. But Kiin Thai has a Google Business Profile, and searching for "kiin thai burbank" brings up a #KnowledgePanel with the correct website address - on a page that is headed with a link to a *scam* website for the same business. Google, in other words, has everything it needs to flag lookalike sites and confirm them with their registered owners.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

It would cost Google money to do this - engineer-time to build and maintain the system, content moderator time to manually check flagged listings, and lost ad-revenue from scammers - but letting the scams flourish makes Google money, at the expense of Google users and Google business customers.

Now, Google has an answer for this: they tell merchants who are being impersonated by ad-buying scammers that all they need to do is outbid them for the top ad-spot.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

This is a common approach - Amazon has a $31b/year "ad business" that's mostly its own platform sellers bidding against each other to show you fake results for your query. The first five screens of Amazon search results are 50% ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

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Pluralistic: How monopoly enshittified Amazon/28 Nov 2022 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

This is "going meta," so naturally, #Meta is doing it too: Facebook and Instagram have announced a $12/month "verification" badge that will let you report impersonation and tweak the algorithm to make it more likely that the posts you make are shown to the people who explicitly asked to see them:

https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/2/21/23609375/meta-verified-twitter-blue-checkmark-badge-instagram-facebook

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Meta Verified and Twitter Blue mark the end of free social media

You used to pay for social media with your eyeballs. Now Meta and Twitter want your money, too.

Vox

Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

The corollary of this, of course, is that if you *don't* pay, they *won't* police your impersonators, and they *won't* show your posts to the people who asked to see them. This is pure enshittification - the surplus from users and business customers is harvested for the benefit of the platform owners:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

The idea that merchants should master the platforms as a means of keeping us safe from their impersonators is a hollow joke.

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Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

For one thing, the rules change all the time, as the platforms endlessly twiddle the knobs that determine what gets shown to whom:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

And they refuse to tell anyone what the rules are, because if they told you what the rules were, you'd be able to bypass them. #ContentModeration is the only #infosec domain where "#SecurityThroughObscurity" doesn't get laughed out of the room:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

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Twiddler - Cory Doctorow - Medium

Tracking Exposed is a scrappy European nonprofit that attempts to understand how online recommendation algorithms work. They comine data from volunteers who install a plugin with data acquired…

Medium

Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

Worse: the one thing the platforms *do* hunt down and exterminate with extreme prejudice is anything that users or business-customers use to twiddle *back* - add-ons and plugins and jailbreaks that override their poor choices with better ones:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

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The OG App, an ad- and Reels-free Instagram clone, is pulled from the App Store

The OG App promised an Instagram experience without Reels, recommendations, and ads. Just a day after debuting on the App Store, the OG App was pulled. Meta says it’s taking “all appropriate enforcement actions.”

The Verge

Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

As I was submitting complaints about the fake Kiin scam-site (and Amex's handling of my fraud call) to the FTC, the California Attorney General, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and Wix, I wrote a little Twitter thread about what a gross scam this is:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1628948906657878016

The thread got more than two million reads and got picked up by #HackerNews and other sites.

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Cory Doctorow (@[email protected]) on Twitter

“So there's a great Thai restaurant in my neighborhood called Kiin. Yesterday, I searched for their website to order some takeout. Here's the Google result.”

Twitter

Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

While most of the responses evinced solidarity and frustration and recounted similar incidents in other domains, a significant plurality of the replies were #ScamApologetics - messages from people who wanted to explain why this wasn't a problem after all.

The most common of these was victim-blaming: "you should have used an #AdBlocker" or "never click the #SponsoredLink."

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Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

Of course, I *do* use an ad-blocker - but this order was placed with a mobile browser, after an absentminded query into the Google search-box permanently placed on the home screen, which opens results in Chrome (where I don't have an ad-blocker, so I can see material behind an ad-blocker-blocker), not Firefox (which *does* have an ad-blocker).

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Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

Now, I *also* have a #PiHole on my home LAN, which blocks most ads even in a default browser - but earlier this day, I'd been on a public wifi network that was erroneously blocking a website (the always excellent superpunch.net) so I'd turned my wifi off, which meant the connection came over my phone's 5G connection, bypassing the PiHole:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/28/shut-yer-pi-hole/

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Pluralistic: 28 Apr 2022 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

"Don't click a sponsored link" - well, the irony here is that if you habitually use a browser with an ad-blocker, *and* you backstop it with a PiHole, you *never see sponsored links*, so it's easy to miss the tiny "Sponsored" notification beside the search result. That goes double if you're relaxing with a dinner guest on the sofa and ordering dinner while chatting.

There's a name for this kind of security failure: the #SwissCheeseModel.

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Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

We all have multiple defenses (in my case: foreknowledge of Google's ad-scam problem, an ad-blocker in my browser, LAN-wide ad sinkholing). We also have multiple vulnerabilities (in my case: forgetting I was on 5G, being distracted by conversation, using a mobile device with a permanent insecure search bar on the homescreen, and being so accustomed to ad-blocked results that I got out of the habit of checking whether a result was an ad).

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Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

If you think you aren't vulnerable to scams, you're wrong - and your confidence in your invulnerability actually *increases* your risk. This isn't the first time I've been scammed, and it won't be the last - and every time, it's been a Swiss Cheese failure, where all the holes in all my defenses lined up for a brief instant and left me vulnerable:

https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/

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Cory Doctorow: Persistence Pays Parasites

My friend Katherine Myronuk once told me, “All complex ecosystems have parasites.” She was talking about spam and malware (these days they’re often the same thing) and other undesirable critters on…

Locus Online

Cory Doctorow Feb 24, 2023

Other apologetics: "just call the restaurant rather than using its website." Look, I know the people who say this don't think I have a time-machine I can use to travel back to the 1980s and retrieve a #YellowPages, but it's hard not to snark at them, just the same. Scammers don't just set up fake websites for your local businesses - they staff them with fake call-centers, too. The same search that takes you to a fake website will also take you to a fake phone number.

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Chuck Munson Feb 24, 2023

@pluralistic Thank you for writing about this! Google scrapes information from restaurant websites and it is often incorrect or impossible to update. As a freelance web developer, this has stolen dozens of clients from me over the past two decades. I can't compete with Google. Sure, Google allows business owners to have Google Business Profiles, but does Google provide customer service? A Silicon Valley Tech Bro company providing customer service?

Chuck Munson Feb 24, 2023

@pluralistic There are also lots of local version of these restaurant verticals. Big headache for this freelance web developer. Fly-by-night local delivery apps who build shitty websites for restaurants as part of their "services."

Zlatin Zlatev ♣Feb 24, 2023

@pluralistic
I would call this Troll Bridge business model.