Increasing transparency through advertiser identity verification | Hacker News Reader

Increasing transparency through advertiser identity verification

blog.google

200 pointsNicoJuicy92 comments

Prepare yourself for ads from amorphous organizations with names like The Committee to Re-Establish Democracy or The Project for a New American Freedom. (No idea if these are real, I just made them up.) I suppose it helps to see precisely who is paying for an advertisement, but I don’t think this is actually useful in a real sense.

The only long-term solution is education: foster a sense of skepticism towards all advertising and encourage reading information from a variety of viewpoints. Of course, Google’s entire existence (and having destroyed traditional media’s business model, the media itself) is predicated on ads, so don’t expect anything this lucid soon.

> foster a sense of skepticism towards all advertising

Here, here. I would go further and say that human society needs a universal convention that flags paid speech as such, and gives people a clear protocol to filter any (or all) paid communication.

Sounds like (a polarized) wanting a yes/no-solution. Maybe for a speech solution you can use a transcript (speech to text converter) which stretches every possible text hyperlinking to (educating) extending webpages with further information hyperlinks, on a topic (wiki, translating pages,...) -what for sure let 'their' influence on you um grow and possibly become more polarized ? An example-try:

Methods:

      language regulation,

      using evaluative Words 
      telling shortend storys 
      repetition
      boasting
      hints ma(s)king half-truth to truth

So now, with that on your mind lets test the transcript adding hyperlinks using the named methods... (-;

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

If you filter the paid speech then it follows you should also filter out the actual art, cinema, theater, etc. it paid for. Now you are left with what?

People actually cook lunch for each other all the time without making a sales pitch, this idea that nothing happens if Google isn't cutting checks is an extremely dim view of humanity.

It isn't cynical but one which understands the value of specialization and ability to provide. If people cannot be supported doing X then doing better at it is limited.

Said paid approach also has implicit patronage as wealth reserves the priveledge to devote a large ammount of resources including time and not get paid for it while monopolizing the prestiege and related benefits of it.

How do you cook lunch over the Internet?

Why are you hanging out on ad supported website right now?

Are you getting compensated for the content you produce here on hackernews?

We already have laws saying that advertising must be marked as such. And the advertising companies are trying to make the marks as invisible as possible.

How little font size can you use? Maybe a size that a person with perfect eyesight can read, but older people cannot, and even the person with perfect eyesight would easily miss it, that is technically legal, isn't it? What if the font color is hard to distinguish from the background color? How far from the advertisement can the warning be placed? If there is a warning, and a small advertisement next to it, and then a longer unrelated text written in different visual style, but still on the same page, it is obvious that the warning applies also to that other text, right? Or, if you are Google, just say that "everyone knows" that the first two or three search results are paid for, so there is no reason to mark them explicitly.

(EDIT: What words should you use for the warning. "Advertisement?" "Sponsored links?" Is it okay to use some words that 90% of your readers would not be sure what they mean, but technically they mean what they are supposed to?)

Then there is the question of what exactly counts as "paid speech". If I send the money directly to you, obviously. If I instead send them to a charity you own? If there is no cash, but I give you hundred bottles of wine? Does it make a difference if you write wine reviews, and you use samples from my gift? If I send you a computer with pre-installed software that you review, and I tell you that you don't have to send the computer back when you are done? If I invite you for an expensive vacation... sorry, I meant "conference", paid by my company? Or what if I never give you anything, just offer to write the articles for you, so you can give them to your boss and take your salary without having to do any work? What if you actually pay me for writing the content, but I give you a discount if I can choose the topic? What if I offer free food for members of the press when they provide coverage for my event? What if no transaction ever happens, but I will simply provide coverage for my friends and ignore the people I don't know.

I am not sure if a clear line can actually be made here. Taken to extreme, even private bloggers would not be allowed to write blogs about topics they are interested in, without providing some disclaimer like "the topic of this article was not chosen impartially". That would be silly, wouldn't it? But then, everyone with more obvious conflict of interest will claim that their case is analogical to this.

The answer to all your questions is the same as it has been for centuries: common law.

Education is certainly one part, but we could also shift business models away from advertising. Ads are a cancer on content and attention, and the fact that so much of the economy is centered around them is mind boggling.

Sure, I definitely agree. Unfortunately it seems unlikely in the short term: Google alone still makes ~85% of its revenue from ads.

Banning advertising doesn’t make this problem go away unless you can also enforce it worldwide. If Google went away, you will have Baidu or Yandex pick up the business. Are we in a position to regulate them too?

Remember that ads existed before internet. They also had the same fundamental problems. Only those days one had to be rich to muck with society

> Banning advertising doesn’t make this problem go away unless you can also enforce it worldwide.

It makes the problem go away to a certain degree in areas were ads are banned. If we banned ads in Europe and US, Russians using Yandex and Chinese people using Baidu would still see ads but we would not.

However we wouldn't see much at all for a while I guess since a number of big internet companies seem to be almost clueless when it comes to ordinary decent business models like "I pay you money, you provide me service without telling every shady tracker in the process.

So I'm not arguing for a ban on advertising as that is completely unrealistic, would hurt tje economy badly, woild be next to impossible to enforce and also counterproductive: I've seen ads that improved my day or even my life.

But I certainly wouldn't cried if someone had stopped WhatsApp from selling out to Facebook. And I certainly wouldn't have cried if online ads became more like ads in newspapers and magazines: static, doesn't move, doesn't make noise, doesn't send requests, embedded into the page server side instead of running giant multi-kilobyte applications in my browser.

Maybe I'd even stop blocking ads of they were less dumb, more relevant and didn't make my computer crawl.

It also doesn't solve the issue that ads are trying to address in the first place, which is to promote your business.

If you outright ban ads, they'll come back in a sneaky way, see influencer marketing / product placement in culture (movies mostly) for how it plays out.

It also prevents smaller businesses to compete with the larger ones because the larger ones have much more clout and branding power.

Not that it makes ads perfect, far from it. But at least ads are transparent unlike all the astro-turfing there is out there.

Is this a case of perfect being the enemy of good?

Ads are often the lowest hanging fruit for ROI. Is it often far easier (less time consuming, less resource intensive, less risky) to manipulate human perception at large into buying your product than providing a functionally better product. Techniques are well established and broad reaching across all domains since it focuses on the consumer's perception. There's a reason businesses pour so much money into marketing and advertising.

Even if you do provide a functionally better product/service than competitors, it's often easier for a competitor to convince consumers their product/service is better than your functionally better product/service, if nothing else, by hiding in ambiguity and complexity or well crafted claims that deceive consumers.

There's also the obvious case that if you have an overall better product/service, if people don't know about it, it's not likely to succeed by word-of-mouth alone (there are exceptions) so advertising to aide discovery provides a necessary function but not to the level of manipulative practices we have today (marketing) that are employing sophisticated psychological techniques and are now even driven by targeted behavior data.

It's one thing to inform people "Hey we made this, it exists, it does this, and here's the cost, you can get it here..." but it's another thing entirely to manipulate consumers perception or play on behavioral faults over--I don't know--delivering a product or service of genuine value?

Given modern business environments, it seems to me that it's often financially best to deliver the minimal functional product/service a consumer will accept and convince them its better than it is (manipulate perceived value). That, to me also, doesn't create a strong economy, it creates a system that helps disproportionately redistribute wealth to those who can (and will) play that game.

> Ads are often the lowest hanging fruit for ROI.

And manufacturing may be cheaper without worrying about polluting or waste dumping, but when those were no curtailed, manufacturing didn't stop, it just found better ways.

> I suppose it helps to see precisely who is paying for an advertisement, but I don’t think this is actually useful in a real sense.

Think from the perspective of an advertiser. Earlier, an advertiser could pay for any ad anonymously. Now any ad you want to show can be traced back to you. This is a meaningful difference. Even if you as a viewer can't pinpoint the specific person behind an ad, they are not completely anonymous anymore (to Google, to law enforcement that may have a warrant, etc). Of course, this change comes at the cost of a reduction in freedom from the lack of anonymity.

Unless there is a government identification with photo of a real person associated with the ad, there is no transparency. Shell corporations and complex ownership structures will obscure any attempt at tracking the source otherwise.

Corporate structure should be public data and involve real people with verified identities, yes?

Anything that reduces the difficulty of tracing should be seen as an improvement. It's a long road from here to perfection, but that's no reason not to take a step.

Until that ownership takes an offshore detour.

Compliance rules could be extended to include due diligence on partners, and block contracts and payments to and from entities that have no clear ownership.

It could but realistically it's unlikely to happen. Nobody would ever accept taking responsibility for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of partners, and the expenses involved in validating every last one of them. Not to mention the lost business on either side. Even the IRS or banks can't keep up with long ownership chains or properly identifying customers and they have a more vested interest.

Laws and rules are far slower to adapt than the workarounds that bend them. And clear ownership says little. Everything can simply point to a more or less real identity that nobody will ever find.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against such rules. I'm just saying that the likelihood of them achieving the results we imagine are slim.

How hard is a policy stating maximum of n-levels depth of nested ownership allowed and any kind of cyclical ownership causes loss of control in both ways?

It's hard because non-fraudulent corporations commonly have very complicated ownership structures. The global corporation owns the US subsidiary which owns the Auto subsidiary which owns Auto Parts subsidiary which owns the Northeast Region Auto Parts subsidiary which owns a subsidiary that makes transmissions which owns a subsidiary that makes warranties for transmissions etc. etc. The level of complexity necessary to confound an external investigation is not inherently less than the level of complexity that exists in legitimate real corporations.

Corporate ownership is also traded as a commodity. The US Auto Parts Northeast Region Transmissions Warranty subsidiary is required to hold assets sufficient to bond the warranties it issues, so instead of keeping a large pile of hundred dollar bills on the coffee table, it holds shares of the parent company and you now have circular ownership. If the parent company is loaded up with debt then you might find that the subsidiaries like that own the majority or entirety of the parent company -- without even necessarily realizing it.

You also have the problem that people willing to commit fraud are willing to commit fraud. Convince some credulous victim that all they have to do is put in $1000 and sign some papers and they can invest in The Next Big Thing and they've not only scammed them out of $1000, now it's the victim's name on the shell corp.

Generally speaking identifying people who don't want to be identified is hard, the methods effective to do so oppress innocent people more than anything, and it is best to look to other solutions. For example, if you discover people are publishing misinformation, show the truth to the same people who saw the misinformation.

I'm just talking about the expectations. Writing the rule is not the difficult part. Enforcing them is because it's extra effort and expense and it leads to losing some business. Shareholders are more than happy to support a company's ethics until they stand in the way of profit.

Finding an appropriate n might be a delicate, many big (legitimate) businesses have really complicated ownership structures. Then you have to task someone with validating all of this. Whose expense is it to do the due diligence and check everything? WHo takes responsibility for failures in this regard? And finally it will mean some business is lost on both sides and it might be a lot of money.

Banks have anti money laundering policies yet still find ways to go around them all the time because they want the business. Banking secrecy wasn't there to protect privacy but to obscure shady activities. As I said, it's good to have the rule and I'm not against it but I have the feeling people have some unrealistic expectations from this. They just raise the bar a bit and filter out the "chaff" while still allowing larger interests to prevail.

> Finding an appropriate n might be a delicate, many big (legitimate) businesses have really complicated ownership structures

It is something between 10 and 13, if you accept that governance structure of an organisation must match its social communication structure. It is something between 14 and 16, if you accept that governance structure of an organisation must match its business divisions. Any n>16 is prone to communication shortcutting.

Four US states permit entirely anonymous LLCs.

Definitely this policy is an improvement, but many of the worst offenders have more than sufficient resources to avoid any impact from this change. It's already the norm for political organizations to adopt entirely useless names. What's the difference between "People for the American Way" and "Citizens United?" And these are both decades-old organizations, not a modern occurrence.

Various regulations (some hinging on direct involvement in electoral advocacy) require various degrees of disclosure of funding sources and beneficial owners, but the system is uneven and often minimally enforced. In practice I expect a huge number of legal entities running advertising whose operators cannot readily be ascertained. This is already the case with groups like Metric Media Foundation where a good degree of investigative journalism was required to figure out who was pulling the strings.

That could be defeatable by crowdsourced research into a common database non blockchain of course ;-) ) and a chrome extension to ad an info UI to every ad, and a Google feature to show you a restorspective look at id info of all ads they've served you recently.

Ah, the "freedom" to be shown misleading ads...

Ad targeting still allows you to fly under the radar of someone who could investigate by only targeting the ad to the idiots that would swallow it whole and not ask questions while everyone else is completely oblivious to the ad's existence.

In fact I'm pretty sure this is happening already regardless of these changes. I recently saw on Reddit that YouTube is promoting ads for very obvious gift card scams, even though I've personally never seen any of those in the few times my ad blocker let me down. Presumably this is because those ads are only targeted to a certain subset of people to both maximise ROI as well as avoid being shown to someone smart enough to identify it as a scam and potentially report it and blow up the whole operation.

A good start (besides banning the cancer that is advertising) would be to have all advertising platforms publish a searchable archive of every ad, who paid for it and the targeting criteria. This means people can at least look behind the curtain and see which ads are out there that they wouldn't normally see due to the targeting criteria not matching them.

> (besides banning the cancer that is advertising)

Not all advertising (especially in the broad sense of the word) is bad. There is one ad in particular in the last year that I'm very glad I saw, because it alerted me to the existence of a product that has provided a lot of value to me. Of course, most advertising nowadays is trash and the web is barely usable without an ad-blocker, but in principle, I think having unobtrusive ads for vetted products isn't such a bad thing.

Not all advertising, especially in the broad sense of the word, is bad. Arguably, most of it is.

http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

Guitar ads are always welcome in my browser :-)

yes, there's tension between transparency for businesses and privacy for individuals (which is the stance i support). on one hand, you want transparency to elucidate crime and even neglect and aggression. on the other, the people behind companies have the right to privacy as well, lest those people be unfairly attacked (e.g., planned parenthood workers). the best tradeoff is not obvious here.

My real estate isn't private. Your public ads have no reason to be.

Workers aren't management/owners.

Education is a part of that, sure.

But I wouldn't say that this leading to amorphous organizations means it's a failure.

It's giving clear ability to connect content you see with well established government legal frameworks. This can help internet ads follow similar level of scrutiny as traditional ads. Is that framework perfect? Of course not. But it's unified framework, with strong ownership (government), enforcement of best practices (judges), etc.

There's only as much as companies can do. Only small part of those problems is technical. Majority of the issues is much broader legal/free-speech issues, that I personally don't want any private, for profit company, to control. It doesn't mean that I'm excited and confident that governments will do it correctly (for sure they won't), but it's right framework to solve those problems.

Obviously if you are fundamentally against the concept of advertising then no version of AdWords will make you happy but.... isn't this change a good thing? Not perfect, but definitely good.

>This change will make it easier for people to understand who the advertiser is behind the ads they see

Call me skeptical, but won't it just lead to shell companies?

Lead to...?

See: Astroturfing (2019), Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Fmh4RdIwswE

And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

Sure, but this puts the spotlight back on the countries which allow shady crap.

Take the United Kingdom. Google says Foo Ltd. are the advertiser, who are Foo Ltd? Well the UK legally requires Foo Ltd. to register with Companies House, a government agency, and this registration legally must identify Persons with Significant Control, actual humans who make decisions for Foo Ltd.

But when you look closer you discover that Foo Ltd has a company secretary who lives in a run down area of an ex-industrial city, and who is listed as secretary for 1800 other companies, and its offices are registered as that person's flat. The PSC section is filled out with the name Offshore Holdings Inc. offering the address of a law firm in the British Virgin Islands, even though the law is clear that Persons means very specifically human individuals.

The UK could clean this up, but of course the people hidden behind this sort of thing are actually wealthy and powerful and are doing all they can to ensure nothing changes. Similar things happen in the US, and in several other developed nations you probably think of as law-abiding and straight dealing. Google can't fix any of that, so this is all you get.

>But when you look closer you discover

What percentage of people who view the ad are going to do this?

More than the number of people who were able to do so before. And hopefully if they find something shady they will let others know. This is why we require certain political ads to be attributed.

Everyone that installed the browser extension that annotates ads for them.

You're referring to financial shell companies used for tax evasion and are a very specific kind of shell company.

Shell companies in general are pretty commonly used and pretty common in the US (I can't speak to other countries). It's very easy to setup a very basic corporation anywhere in the US and can take anywhere from a week to a month depending on the state.

That corporation can get paid to run ads by another corporation. The new corporation will pay Google to run the ads and will still pay taxes, but their name will show up. The new corporation is providing a service as a middleman.

There are some specific restrictions on doing this kind of thing for other purchases and acting on others behalf, but not for ad buys.

The type of company you're thinking of would insist it's engaged in tax avoidance not evasion, and since the UK has a General Anti-Avoidance Rule it would furthermore claim that the tax efficiency is a result of some otherwise quite reasonable behaviour and isn't some scheme that makes no sense except for how it conveniently avoids taxation. But mostly, as you hint, it's hoping to stay under the radar so nobody asks awkward questions.

However my point applies for shady outfits advertising on Google too. It may make sense for some companies to pay money to have a third party place their advertising, perhaps as part of some value-added service that offsets the extra cost, but under a know-your-customer regime that company doesn't want to annoy Google. If you earn $10M a year re-selling Google's adverts then the chance to earn $1M putting your name on an obvious scam is a bad deal - Google's going to cut you off and there goes the $10M pa revenue.

So the first type of shell is likely to get implicated in scummy stuff that happens in future, and as I showed you'll find out it's a dead end because your government doesn't care about making businesses tell the truth about who they are. And that's not Google's fault, it's something your elected representatives might fix if they thought you knew and cared.

> But when you look closer

If you have US based LLC there is no looking closer. The only thing public will be your registered agent and company name, nothing else.

Just looked at my LLC. Has business address and agent and lists my human name as the Governor of the company. Your claim seems incorrect.

This depends entirely on the state. Four states, notably including Delaware, permit registration of an LLC with absolutely no public disclosure of parties involved beyond the agent. Other states consider this information public record but don't make it easily accessible.

Ok, makes sense. I'm in WA and we've got what some call good FOIA and "sunshine" laws.

There are already shell companies. PACs serve to obfuscate the source of funding. I don't see a reason why there will be more shell companies, if the existing ones can be used in this area.

At least, people maybe able to know the group associated to the ads suspiciously tries to hide their identity. Not perfect, but still an improved situation.

With verification, will Google be culpable the next time one of my users is redirected to a tech support scam from a Google ad?

At least twice a year at my business users are redirected to tech support scams from Google Search ads. Its always a similar story, "I searched for Amazon and clicked the first link".

Google being culpable for malicious ads will only happen if the US finally removes Section 230 immunity. Until then, they'll keep profiting off criminal activity whilst claiming it's not their fault.

Verifying the (corporate) identity of the advertisers, doesn't affect their responsibility for content (or lack thereof), but it might mean you could sue the advertiser without first needing to get the information on the advertiser from Google.

Good to know that I'll be able to sue a corporation from Antigua that was setup by a shady foreign law firm. I'm sure that will go well and be a good use of my resources.

This is all a veil to try and hide the fact that Google wants ads to blend in better with results. Every couple of years Google makes it harder to distinguish ads from content. https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-goog...

If somebody with a blue check mark on Twitter commits a crime, is Twitter responsible?

No, because apparently it's in the public interest that it be seen. See https://www.thedailybeast.com/twitter-we-cant-block-trump-be...

In your example, did the twitter platform enable the crime? Did the twitter user in your example pay to use the twitter platform that enabled the crime?

Is it okay that a search engine looks like malware sometimes? You'd think that Google would want to wipe its ass.

For those interested, Facebook already does something similar, and also has an "Ad Library" [0] where you can monitor ads related to "social issues, elections or politics." It's pretty interesting, worth checking it out.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/ads/library

Google also has a website similar to Facebook's Ad Library: https://transparencyreport.google.com/political-ads/region/U...

This has big implications when advertisers get banned due to bad behaviors. Previously a bad actor who gets banned could easily just quickly reopen a new account. If they need to get verified, there are a few steps which increase expenses and turn around time. If they need to create a new shell entity every time they get banned, it adds significantly to amount of time and money required to get their shady advertising out.

This is particularly important right now as the cost of advertising on Google (and in general) is going down right now because of the pandemic.

It's a good time to be running shell company services. I wonder what kind of turn around time you could achieve...

The hard part will probably be finding an agent to represent the company. Assuming they validate bans based on company representatives.

Interesting. That's what I've been doing with SiteTruth for a decade. Unlike Google, I can't make advertisers give me documents, so I have to dig into public records.

I look forward to seeing what info Google provides to users. The demo is useless. Name and "Location: United States" isn't much. I doubt Google will really provide much info about their advertisers; they're paying customers. Search users are the product.

I'd want to see the actual name and address of the business (as required in CA and the EU), business license info (required in the UK), incorporation state and serial number (required for an EV certificate), and have an option to buy a business credit report from D&B. At various times I've put all of those on SiteTruth.com.

It's become harder to get the data needed. A decade ago, an online-only business with no clear ownership or street address was almost always a scam. Now, it's not uncommon, although the scam percentage is still high. Businesses are also allowed more anonymity now, this being considered "privacy". There are "low-doc" states, such as Nevada. Owners of postal mail boxes used to be public record; now they're anonymous. D&B used to encourage companies to publicize DUNS numbers; now they consider that proprietary. It's a great time to be an online scammer.

Would be nice if the information was not two clicks away but rather front and center, especially for political ads, but a really good step nonetheless

This is the plan. Once google have verified the advertisers, they can ‘help users understand the source of the advert’ by replacing the mini Ad icon with the advertisers’ favicon, to increase transparency..

> ...with the advertisers’ favicon, to increase transparency.

My mom thinks any URL with a padlock next to it is über secure [0][1] and that she can give her bank details without worry.

[0] https://zeltser.com/padlock-and-favicon-confusion-in-browser...

[1] https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170416-W...

This is why Chrome and Firefox changed it to a grey padlock instead of a green one

https://blog.chromium.org/2018/05/evolving-chromes-security-...

Increased transparency would be having "Advertisement" (no abbreviation) and the advertiser's icon.

Replacing "Ad" with advertiser's icon is simply a method how not to display "Ad". I expect that many icons will not be company logos, but rather something that seems like it would normally appear in a web page: a small arrow, a tiny dot, a thumb-up, etc.

Then the Google will have credible deniability: hey, we didn't make the icon, the advertiser did, blame him. But of course they are the ones who refuses to display "Advertising" clearly.

This is interesting timing given the general decline of ad revenue due to the COVID economic slowdown. I'm surprised and impressed that they are making things harder for advertisers when then are probably fighting harder for every ad dollar.

It doesn't hurt that GOOG has an incredible amount of capital on hand.

They would rather establish a framework of proof that they control rather than have a more onerous and inflexible one imposed upon them by the EU. When large companies do due diligence to show accountability, it's less likely that a government will try to force them to do it.

It is meaningless, because they accept corporate identities, and it is trivial to create shell corporations with meaningless names, like Americans For Good Stuff And Against Bad Stuff.

There is a conference going on with Ernst & Young right now about identity verification, an Italian publication is posting verification data on the Ethereum blockchain, for each article. It is mostly for the publisher to protect themselves when people ask about whether they were actually the source, doesn't protect people from sharing fake sources or making it look similar with their own "verification" entries on a blockchain.

Steps!

If you haven't, check out Decentralized Identifiers [1] and Sovrin blockchain [2].

[1] https://w3c.github.io/did-core/

[2] https://sovrin.org

I'd settle for more transparency around the consumers of the ad. I've heard a few folks wonder aloud if huge percentages of their paid search volume is fraudulent. Transparency on the consumer side is good, but there should be more work to prevent bot traffic from eating ad spend.

Interesting timing right before a U.S. election. Likely trying to avoid Russian disinformation like in 2016.

You realize they only spent 100k in Facebook ads in 2016?

At least someone gets a good ROI from Facebook ads.

Yes I know, but the whole impeachment thing happened because of that modest amount nevertheless.

It says in the post that they've been verifying political advertisers since 2018. Now it is being extended to all advertisers.

Would it possible for me to turn off all the ads from all the advertises?

Hypothetically, of course!

They have/had this, but it hasn't proven terribly popular: https://contributor.google.com/

edit: I say "had" because I think it has changed forms over its lifetime. I think originally you could simply load up credits and it would cover ads across the web with blank images.

It would still track you though which is a bigger problem than the ads being visible.

i think this is a great step. also we as a company dont have nothing against that, at least it would be more visible that some of our competition is faking a local presence.

Interesting development — Will be fun to see who all the freelance superstar adsense pros are.

Very bad, anti-privacy, anti-anonymity development.

As governments around the world get increasingly totalitarian and everything gets regulated to death or outright illegal, the timing for Google to ban necessarily anonymous individuals, organizations and businesses couldn't be worse!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com