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Comment by oceliker | Hacker News Reader

I'm somewhat confused here. I live in the US but regularly visit Turkey to see family (say, once a year). I also regularly Google things related to the US when I'm there.

Clicks outside the US are not necessarily meaningless -- the screenshot in the article shows that they are targeting people "regularly in the US". Just because I left for a couple of weeks does not mean I abandoned everything related to where I live. There's still value in targeting US ads to me, independent of my current location.

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I’m the opposite. An American living abroad. US targeted ads still are applicable to me. I can understand why someone might want to disable this feature, but it’s not a scam by any means.

> US targeted ads still are applicable to me.

Not necessarily applicable to the advertiser, though. If there's a US restaurant chain hoping for regular customers, they would be wasting their ad spend if you're on the receiving end of the ads.

The default option says that it targets "people in, or show interest in , your targeted location." The author tightened the settings only after he realized the clicks came from outside the US. Also, it's unnatural that multiple clicks from the same location were made in a quick succession.

The author tightened the settings only after he realized the clicks came from outside the US

It is worse than that, the country targeting setting was already at maximum tightness. This is a very bad dark pattern by Google, there is no setting to strictly target a country.

https://miro.medium.com/max/1048/1*5I7qjuarkWtiNltBdR1Quw.pn...

My guess is that they're getting "other Google affiliates".

What happens is a "publisher" combines CSE with Adsense then drives (often robotic) traffic to the ads that come back in the feed. They then identify high-paying keywords and make money.

Sophisticated attackers will observe that Google cares if the IP address matches the CSE request, but they don't care if the cookie and IP make sense (or if that cookie is being used elsewhere in the world). This means a sneaky extension can lift the (advertising) cookies of Google users elsewhere in the world and deliver them to places (e.g. Turkey) where it is convenient to run the click farm.

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