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Comment by Inconel | Hacker News Reader

I'm not asking this to be snarky, but for anyone who might be privy to these discussions, is there constant and vigorous debate within Google about the ethics of targeted advertising, media/tech consolidation, and other ethically ambiguous drivers of revenue?

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I was an Ads PM at Google several years ago. While there are many reasons I personally disliked working there, how Google handles the ethical concern of advertising and Search is not one of them. Google cares about being Search first. Ads are seen as a happy side effect of being able to fully and correctly answer a user's question. Search is often used with commercial intent, after all. One piece of thing most people don't realise is that showing an ad doesn't make Google money. In fact, showing an ad that doesn't convert into a purchase can often lose Google money by depressing the value of an impression. So Google invests a lot in the "targeted" part of the advertising, and making sure that the ad actually provides value.

That's an interesting way of stating that Google goes through great effort to discover how best to convince a user to click on an ad.

A long time ago, ads on google search were clearly distinct from organic results. Nowadays, they're mixed so well that only those who know they should check for the difference notice it.

I particularly don't like when the first result is the paid result from company X, and the second result is the organic result of company X, which is only paying to outbid competitors that could appear as #1 when people search for "X".

I'll use very strong words here, but that paid ad for me is not different from "protection money" you pay to a racket so they ensure nothing bad happens to your business. It's highly unethical, but, I'm sure, incredibly profitable: in these cases I make the conscious choice to click the organic result, and NOT the paid one, but I'm pretty sure I'm one in 100.

So, I don't doubt that there are ethical debates inside Google, but it's clear that, the more it becomes just another public company for which the overriding concern can only be increasing shareholder value, the less any ethical consideration that has an impact on the bottom line can have an effect.

> I particularly don't like when the first result is the paid result from company X, and the second result is the organic result of company X, which is only paying to outbid competitors that could appear as #1 when people search for "X".

Haha that annoys me too, and I can totally follow the logic for choosing the organic result, but I use the reasoning that I want to "stick it" to the company whose advertising and force them to pay for the ad they are showing me, so I actually intentionally click the paid result.

Well, some advertisers for sure deserve that, but think about, eg, SomeGoodCompany.com which is organically and legitimately the top result if I search "SomeGoodCompany" in my url bar.

If SomeBadCompany comes and starts bidding for the keyword "SomeGoodCompany", and SomeGoodCompany doesn't, when Joe Average searches "SomeGoodCompany", he will see "SomeBadCompany.com - we're even better than SomeGoodCompany..." as his top result - guaranteed by Google, the expert Joe trusts to find the best websites for any subject!

How can SomeGoodCompany NOT pay Google to stop that from happening, supposing they have the means to do it?

When "SomeBadCompany" had their results displayed on the right column, that wasn't an existential threat. Now, it is.

Edits: clarified language

many of us are well aware of the massive efforts google puts into tracking every detail of our lives whether we want them to or not. your spin on this is downright hilarious

tbh the fact that you made a throwaway to bully a random person on the internet is even more hilarious

> is there constant and vigorous debate within Google about the ethics of targeted advertising, media/tech consolidation, and other ethically ambiguous drivers of revenue?

Yes. Sometimes it's overshadowed by debate on other issues.

I don't always agree with it, but there is a diversity of opinion expressed, at least among the people who engage in said debate.

Not really no. I think at this stage, anyone at Google knows how it works. If you are ethically opposed to advertising, then Google may not the place you should choose to work at.

Google does not build a dossier up on individuals nor sell your data directly to advertisers. It collects signals about random cookie GUIDs and uses those to show ads about shoes that is trivial to opt out of and block.It does not know "who you are" (no names, no dates of birth etc - only guessed-at genders and ages brackets that are usually laughably out of whack) it just knows that a cookie has some vague city-level geo-location, watched some fashion videos on YouTube and searched for "shoes". Then advertisers can chose to show ads to people in New York who might want to buy a new handbag and that cookie is part of that potential audience.

Personally I do not see an ethical problem with cookie IDs. Please elaborate on what your ethical issues to random GUIDs are?

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