(Yes, I know it's mostly the ad's fault, but there's no practical way to punish them directly. So force apps to pick better-behaving networks.)
They did work with a bad ad network though so it's a valid enough reason to complain imo.
“Hey you bought socks that one time! Want more socks??” -> Unsubscribe.
“Hey it’s your weekly sock news! What’s new in socks!” -> But I unsubscribed! Haha no, you only unsubscribed from the “product releases” list. Not the “weekly news” list or our 10 other fabulous mailing lists!
-> Report all emails from this domain as spam. May god have mercy on your soul, cute socks.
Interacting with a company/organization immediately turns into a lifelong "legitimate relationship" that supposedly entitles them to contact you forever and ever.
Meanwhile, near immediately, they would love a review! They want Participation in OUR new oven.
It's overwhelming, and most frustrating is it seems 'communication' is rapidly become a one way st.
You got served an ad from "one of our partners". That's all you'll get to know, and there's no mechanism to even report the app's shitty behavior to Google or Apple (and they don't care when the app becomes too large, either).
They could have a separate ad-reporting UI in every ad-running app (so you can report stuff later), and they could reward valid reports by skipping all ads on their network for a month or something, but doing that would reduce fraud, and that means reducing their profit. So none of them do it.
I'd say they probably need an oversight committee with teeth, to strongly punish every single violation (so the networks develop functional defenses), but they'll probably just VW-emissions-fraud their way around it.
(If you're using a mouse, forget what I said. But I haven't run into an ad where the close button didn't close it... if you were able to click the close button.)
——
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
Another trick that I’ve noticed on the Reddit app is that the tappable area is much larger for ads than normal posts. If you tap even near the ad it will visit the ad
They're very very clearly click-fraud tricks, and most platforms will ban them if they're caught. But by clicking on the ad, it closes the ad, and there's no way to go back and report them, nor incentive for ad-viewers to do so. By design, IMO.
The whole industry runs on scams like this, there's no incentive for large platforms to proactively block any of them because they lead to money moving through them, where they can extract their rent. They only move against the most egregious, to keep fraud at the same barely-acceptable level as all the others.
Wasn’t there an article here a few days ago about Facebook specialising in hiding such malicious ads from testers and law enforcement to maximise gains?
if(testdetected == 1)
ecm.lowemissions
else
lmao.fuckyouregulatorspetrol goes in, toxic gas comes out, so make toxic gas less.
most of them have 0% understanding as to how data mining works or how online ads (and scams) function