Google Legally Profits from Fraud on Its Platform | Hacker News Reader

Google Legally Profits from Fraud on Its Platform

extremetech.com

152 pointsrahuldottech50 comments

Was expecting to see various types fraud that google profits from, instead it seems to be focused mainly on "(business) identity theft via google maps" - right?

Thought for sure there would be info about things like taking ads for "flashplayer" that installed malware, things like taking money for ads for "walmart" searches instead of just listed the organic result, because there is implied threat of NOT listing walmart at the top due to competitor ads or "gamed" search results.

Enabling places like grubhub and others to take over search results for restaurants / small businesses and brands in the search results.

Censoring organic results, yet allowing paid listings to insert themselves within.

I'm sure there are many more forms of fraud that could be brought up that are mainly possible with google.

Basically looking for more perspective given the title, I think the title could of been less broad given the article's info.

Funnier than the flashplayer ads, is that "Google Chrome" was (is?) a heavy ad target for malware.

It's amazing how many scams and malware-serving websites are in Google Ads, and how aggressively Google refuses to address it. I've actually had Googlers (here on HN) go and report and have removed the malicious sites I reported, just to see them back a handful of hours later, without so much as rotating domain names out.

Google must be stripped of any profit from criminal activity on their platform. When a fraudulent site is removed, Google should be forced to give up all of the profits generated from it. Though I doubt Google would even make the Fortune 500 if it did.

Section 230 absolutely has to go for order and justice to prevail.

My go-to example for the particular type of predatory crimes Google knowingly and willfully enables happens whenever a senior citizen searches for "mapquest": https://www.google.com/search?q=mapquest

I actually took a call yesterday from someone who "couldn't get directions from MapQuest without installing something". And if you look at the search results, you'll see why: Ads that look like real search results that claim to be MapQuest push the real MapQuest below the scroll fold. And computer-illiterate individuals get taken advantage of, again and again and again. I've been pointing out this example for six or seven years, and the same domains that were operating then are still operating today, because Google simply makes too much money from them to care.

If you work for Google, this is where your paycheck is coming from, and if you use Google, this is the cost of your convenience.

Google has a strong incentive to be ineffective at catching fraud on their platform, and despite the company line, it shows through their actions.

Indeed. I think it's fundamentally key to fixing this that profit from fraudulent activity be confiscated. (I'm sure we can find a responsible way to spend it, compensating victims of fraud or something similar.)

With ad slots being an auction of sorts, Google benefits from increased bidding when there are more bidders... including fraudulent ones. So there's zero reason for them to prevent fraud. If upon a fraudulent account being reported and shut down, they lost all of their profit from that account's history, they would have a significant incentive to prevent fraud on the platform, since any fraudulent "winners" would completely zero out an ad slot for them.

In a way Google probably fears addressing these issues because once they take ownership of them, they are going to be forever saddled and blamed when bad ads get through their review system or when shitty videos get promoted on youtube or when people get some "racist" result when they ask OK Google about $stereotype. Google's main source of cash is replacing humans with automation. For them re-introducing humans (i.e. risk) into the equation means seeing dollar bills grow wings and fly off. Most internet companies do not want their services to have a human labor component. It used to be a joke that you could never call anyone at Google to get any of their shit fixed. They just farmed it out to the "community". But whose laughing now? They used to "organize the worlds information", but 'information' soon changed to 'content', and 'content' to 'content farm'. I doubt any significant percentage of their users are ever going to switch away from Google. There is almost no way to detect if you should have gotten a better search result or a better ranking. The results are OK as long as you get a link that is vaguely useful. Its been years since you could even look at the actual results. They claim a query has a millions of results, but you can't even go past page 20. #Fail ? Us nerds made them popular by recommending them to our friends and family and/or surreptitiously installing Chrome to escape the tech-support-calls-from-hell for IE toolbars and shit. We're partly responsible too..

They're already heavily tweaking YouTube and Search results. They really shouldn't have section 230 protections for their ad platforms.

> Section 230 absolutely has to go for order and justice to prevail.

For those who are unfamiliar with the reference, section 230 is a provision of a telecommunications act that gives legal immunity to platform providers that host user-provided content [0]. Getting rid of it would absolutely kill this site and 99.99% of similar sites by effectively requiring all user generated content to go through legal review. Absent review, a malevolently minded individual could post libelous or other illegal content on a website and have the site itself be sued. It would have a terribly chilling effect on the internet as we know it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

I don't think anyone wants to completely get rid of 230, but it should be narrowed. I think an ideal compromise would be that ubiquitous mega-platforms should be held somewhat responsible for what their users post, under certain circumstances.

If a platform is already protectively policing and curating content, then they are not really a platform, they are more of a publisher.

Companies like Facebook and YouTube should absolutely be open to lawsuits for what users post. They are already investing significant resources in regulating what users post anyway, so they are taking responsibility for it.

I think even large websites should still get full 230 protection, if they only have minimal moderation to remove spam or blatantly illegal content, like Craigslist. Craigslist is much more of a neutral platform than Facebook.

They’re investing significant resources in regulation because the public and lawmakers have demanded they do. Craigslist can afford to be more neutral only because nobody’s trying to organize cyberbullying campaigns or Rohingya genocides through Craigslist.

This is exactly what these companies want you to believe, but the Internet would survive removing platform immunity. The incentive would definitely move in favor of platforms policing content, but the "chilling effect" would be limited if these platforms wished to remain in business (they do).

As I noted in one of my comments, if illicit profits were confiscated even, platforms would have significant motivation to remove illicit content, even if they couldn't be charged for criminal activity themselves.

Reminds me of the Reply All episode about locksmiths & Google Maps (https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2ho87)

Interestingly enough, Google responded to that with a product offering: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+certified+locksmith

Not sure how well it works, as I haven't needed a locksmith in a long time. But for what it's worth, there is that.

Nothing comes up related to what you described, I just see a bunch of listings for Angie's list.

You might need to disable your ad-blocker

And YouTube was built on exploiting flagrant copyright infringement, making it easier than ever for the masses.

It is such a difficult balance to be had since by taking a position of trying to resolve any/all frauds in the platform, they create a can of worm that is difficult, if not impossible to fill. The failure of finding all the frauds, illegal activity would prohibitively expensive, if not destructive to the platform itself (Think false-positives, etc).

For them, it is better/easier to say "we have the platform, we remove what we are legally bound to remove, everything else is on the user to be mindful of".

I mean so does Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, FedEx, and any other service provider who hasn't 100% eliminated fraud (which is all of them).

Why is there so much attention on Google?

It's market cap is $800B. Amazon and Microsoft are roughly $1T. Facebook is $600B.

We're not a bunch of rubes here, to have this many articles proposing sanctions and/or breakup of Google has all the fingerprints of coordinated action. It's less than a month after the US president saying he would sue them because he felt they didn't give conservative sources favorable enough index ranking.

This has a stink to it.

>This has a stink to it.

TBH so does using market cap to dismiss criticism of Google

But it's not dismissing criticism. It's acknowledging that other big companies that have pretty similar issues are not coming under fire for the said issues.

Maybe they should talk about those issues and not bring up market cap because market cap really has nothing to do with any of this

As I have pointed out elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20444182) Microsoft and Facebook has been under fire as well.

And yes, it was deserved for them as well.

Some of the accusations are pretty thin too, this one included. Last I checked, Google doesn't make money off of organic Google Maps results, except inasmuch as Maps acts as a halo product.

What exactly is Google supposed to do here? Are they to require a validated business license to update one's listing on Google Maps? Besides the non-trivial expense associated with that, it would act as a barrier to entry for smaller businesses that don't have one, and you can bet there'd be articles on here hating that too (just like there have been about the GMail API changes).

Big news and small news alike have both been viewing Google with dollar signs in their eyes for the last 10 or so years, believing that their failure to adopt their business models to the internet is somehow Google's fault.

> Why is there so much attention on Google?

Amazon declared tomorrow "Prime Day" and a lot of workers are striking today and/or tomorrow.

Throwing shade at Google would be a good way to keep technical people from paying attention to the plights of workers.

But it could also just be a coincidence.

I was thinking they were all guilt of this within the first paragraph. You use to have to beware on eBay, but the Amazon marketplace is just as full with counterfeits and bad products that it's like the new Wal-Mart. Newegg and Reverb both do the marketplace thing too, but their volume seems to be low enough to be hit with unsavory shops.

I heard about the problem with Google and locksmiths and was very careful the one time I locked my keys in my car without a backup a few years ago. I refused any locksmith that didn't quote an absolute price and found a local one that only charged $60.

> But it could also just be a coincidence.

It's not Prime Day, and there's bad press about Google. It's Prime Day, and there's still bad press about Google. Prime Day is over, and there will continue to be bad press about Google.

The word I'd go for isn't "coincidence." It's something more like Captain Obvious.

I'd love it love it love it if the richest companies had this little class solidarity. A nice change of pace.

I'd guess many anti-corporate sentiments are rising, and there's just some overlap in scheduling

I don’t know. But one should not be naive about it. The political machines have massive resources, strong connection to media and have nailed information campaigns down to an art.

I noticed a similar thing about a year ago when Facebook was in the crosshairs.

Having said that. These companies are obvious monopolies prone to abuse their power.

There is attention on all of them. And every time one of them gets bad press, someone is ready to point out that the current target is unfairly singled out from the others.

There's been a substantial amount of criticism for fraud on Amazon's ecommerce arm, here on HN and generally.

Microsoft's market cap is largely software/services, where fraud's largely going to impact Microsoft themselves. Bing Ads are likely peanuts compared to Google's offering.

There is a major boycott of Amazon this week after it came out they're directly competing for military contracts that Google declined to take [0].

It's almost certainly the case that Amazon is helping and urging people to post negative stories about other high profile competitors, Google included, right now. That's just how tech journalism works. Amazon is just much better at it than less successful attempts like the "scroogled" campaign.

This does not dismiss the bad things Google does. However, it does mean that it's a good week to remind people to boycott Amazon any way they can in addition to holding Google accountable.

[0]: Although that outcome was largely driven by collective action from employees and reports of some employee retaliation were public as a result of it.

"It's almost certainly the case" without any evidence whatsoever? I mean, there's a lot of companies who have a reason to promote Google's fraud-based business model (mostly, companies being defrauded by it).

What would you say makes it "almost certainly" about Amazon?

Forgive me if it's a case of mistaken identity, but I seem to recall last time we talked you started harassing me on other social media sites demanding I answer your arbitrary questions and attempting to solicit distributed harassment.

Don't you think it's better for both our mental health and the tone of HN if we not argue about this, and perhaps agree both companies do bad things and scheduled boycotts of both can be a good example of collective action?

Charles C. Johnson

> Why is there so much attention on Google?

Because they’ve been behaving badly for years and a number of people like me will upvote anything that gives them a pounding (of course only if I think it makes sense.)

A better question should probably (again IMO) be why they’ve gotten away so easily for so long.

> Amazon and Microsoft are roughly $1T. Facebook is $600B.

Facebook has taken a lot more beating. All very deserved IMO, in fact I think they deserve a fair bit more, but at least they got more than Google AFAIK, which is reasonable.

Microsoft has been beaten so much by sysadmins like me, governments etc, both for fun and for profit that I don’t think anything Google or Facebook has experienced yet really compares.

Amazons time hasn’t come yet I guess.

Google's been stinking a long time my friend. The other companies you mentioned are also dealing with one bad publicity piece after another. Amazon strikes going on today for instance. 5 Billion dollar fine to Facebook etc...

Don't worry, there's plenty of room in my heart to hate and wish ill upon all the scummy fraud-enabling private dragnet spy corporations.

> It's less than a month after the US president saying he would sue them because he felt they didn't give conservative sources favorable enough index ranking.

Keep in mind that this is a hunk of crap.

It does stink.

https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...

The top 10 tech companies are interchangeably flamed here and all over the internet and for good reason. This isn't a google problem, you just happen to be in a google thread.

Appreciate your comment, but I've been posting here in various capacities for about a decade and employed in tech for about twice that long.

I am not talking about HN's reaction, but the wider pattern of calls from high levels to investigate and break up Alphabet. It is functionally the same as AT&T and Time Warner - using the threat of antitrust and other powers of the FTC to get favorable treatment and harm adversaries. It is new and dangerous.

I cannot wait to publish our stats on how effective google captcha is blocking bots.

Let me guess, 0%? :-)

We beat recaptcha v3 50% of the time v2 about 20%

But the monetization is so good! lol.

Just me or is the biggest company that likely has the highest % of their revenue generated illegally AirBnB? By "illegal" I mean the listing does not conform to local, state, and/or federal law for rental/vacation home rentals.

I've never heard of a situation where busted million-dollar rings of illegal AirBnBs ever resulted in the company being forced to refund fees.

How quaint: a comment in a post critical to Google, by an account created an hour ago, bashing not-Google.

How about eBay and Amazon knowingly selling counterfeit goods to the tune of billions? Or Craigslist for sex workers?

I'm sure none of these companies started out with the intention of profiting from illegal or immoral activities, but once they notice that prophet bump, it becomes difficult for them to make changes, especially if no one really cares or complains too much...

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