Can you prosecute Google for spreading viruses and helping criminals?
Effectively you want Google to be the law enforcement corporation and not your government thus massively expanding their power and reach.
Why would you want that? (And that also goes for people who want Apple to replace their government at law enforcement).
If someone were to stand outside holding a big banner advertising something malicious/illegal they'll be in legal trouble pretty quickly, which I think is fair.
Why shouldn't Google be held to the same standard?
For the most part, you would not. While it is not protected by the first amendment in the US to advertise illegal products, it is also not particularly restricted in most of the US.
To whit: If you hold up a big banner saying "fentanyl sale - 30 cents per gram", you would not have committed a crime or an actionable legal tort in most places.
The thing that is actionable everywhere is deceptive/fraudulent/misleading advertising.
That seems to be much more appropriate approach to prevent this kind of crime. Why is US so incompetent at punishing scammers as a country?
Google is a company that nets 60 billion $ a year in profits. They can afford hiring a few thousand people to manually vet ads before they go out, and they should.
It's kinda bizarre how many here whine about not trusting Google and then just want to give them police powers.
What do you think the number of different ads being displayed is, given how much each ad costs?
Estimates suggest it's about 30 billion ad impressions per day to earn that.
If each distinct ad gets 1000 impressions, that's 10 billion ads to review per year.
Let's be super generous, and assume it's 10k impressions, leaving us with 1 billion ads to review.
Let's further assume it's 1 minute per ad to review them, because people are super good at it. This will take 694440 person/days to review.
So to even give a 24 hour turnaround time, they'd have to hire 694,000 people.
If they pay them 65k each (yearly minimum wage in california), that's 45 billion a year.
This again, assumes we have ads with lots of impressions, it's only a minute per ad, and that we are okay with 24 hour turnaround time. Otherwise, it costs more.
It's really easy for people to play the "company makes x, they can afford y" game, but without real data it's sort of magical thinking.
I doubt humans could easily keep up with the review load here, at scale, at any reasonable cost/living wage.
And if it leads to less, but higher quality ads in the end, even better.
[1] https://dejure.org/dienste/vernetzung/rechtsprechung?Gericht...
That is all.
We should decide what to do about it based on correct data and sane assumptions, not random assertions that are off by orders of magnitude and backed by no data.
If Google cannot handle legit business then it should manage their resources better.
Advertising malware is not legit business.
"We are so profitable and big" is not excuse for it.
It is reason why they earn so much money, they do not care if criminals advertise malware.
Now banks must spend awful lot of money to fight money laundering. Maybe it is time to force Google to take some responsibility.
Sure. I"m pointing out this simple sort of "they can easily afford to do x" is usually nonsense.
I haven't commented at all on what the result should be (not allowed to do it or whatever), simply that the math that it would be simple to fix is wrong.
If we are going to argue about things in a useful way, we should avoid random assertions without data that don't really advance the argument, especially when they are trivially wrong?
If Google cannot handle their ad business, when there are too many customers, then stop taking new customers.
Very simple.
But taking money from criminals is very profitable and that is the reason.
Edit: Checked DannyBee profile: "I manage developer workflow tools and services at Google"
That explains why he is defending Google's scammy behaviours.
This sort of dismissal based on who you work for is both childish, and unproductive to a real discussion. Similar to the "most fanboyish thing ever" comment, which, honestly, if telling someone their totally unsourced math and claim is wrong, by providing data and real math, is the most fanboyish thing you've ever seen, then i think you are very lucky in what you see ;)
Beyond that, i'll repeat what I said - i simply pointed out the assertion and math is wrong. That is all. You are the one claiming i am defending anything, beyond that, at all. I was very careful about not defending anything, and in fact said i'm open to all sorts of views about what to do about it.
Maybe you should re-read what i wrote, and point out any point where i did anything but show that the claim made was wrong, and the math was wrong?
If it is true, then Google execs should be in jail right now.
And proves point again that Google does not care about filtering content and it is profitable to accept money from criminals.
Ofcourse if your paycheck depends of criminals money then it is very dumb to share that profit to hire more people to fight malware content.
In my country there are many Google scam ads which feature local celebrities/doctors, but it is impossible to remove those ads, because Google never removes them. Zero response from Google. Even Police cannot help because nobody from Google responses.
So I guess it is intentional to spread those spam ads.
Even if users report those ads, Google 99% of time never takes an action to remove spam ads.
With few thousand people you can remove those reported ads...
Google doesn't have to do this because they are anticompetitive.
The root problem here is that Google shouldn't be in this position where we are talking about them acting as law enforcement, and a business getting banned by Google is akin to getting ejected from society.