Yes, that means amending the law (in the US). But the law as it is written facilitates crime.
It's not just malicious software ads, they also sell ads to entities mitming every government service.
If my government tries to regulate, tax, or otherwise annoy one of these corporations, their billionaire owner will deposit a few million into the right campaign fund and the Big Cheeto will tariff us, threaten to invade us, swear at us, send us ambassadors who swear at us, or start trying to rename bodies of water. (He'll probably do that anyways.) In general, it's bad enough for our business that we usually just let these companies do what they want and hope that, someday, the U.S. will regulate them properly. That's unlikely to happen anytime soon. (Note: Even Democrats get nasty when their campaign funding is threatened.)
In the meantime, look out for the people you care about and support anything that pries your data out of American fingers.
If a newspaper took money to advertise blatant, obvious scams, I assume a judge would consider them at least partially responsible for restitution, if not an accessory to the crime. Looking away really hard (and delegating the task of looking away really hard) shouldn't get you out of this.
Hold the publisher responsible, they can then hold the platform responsible, thus creating a market for platforms that actually fight scams. Right now, there is limited incentive to fight scams, as the scams still drive revenue. If you take money for it, you should be responsible for it.
> If you take money for it, you should be responsible for it.
If they don't want to take responsibility then they should guarantee that the responsible party have provided valid credentials that can result in their being held responsible.
That would clear up the quagmire that is internet advertising pretty darn quick.
In other words, I think the law wants what you and OP said to be true, but seems like it doesn't apply once you get big enough. Anecdotally, Amazon and Walmart and other big retailers seem to not be held responsible when they sell goods that dont work as advertised or even actively harm people.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_of_Fortune_(magazine)#...
If you have to buy a newspaper to publish your info, that is quite a high bar.
At the same time, none of us* want malware scum to use newspaper ads to fleece people.
*OK, some of us write malware scum. I don't count their opinions as valid.
We managed to get into google ad exchange (via a personal connection as we’d normally be too small to get there directly, it’s essentially adsense with more control and more money), and compared to the other players we saw, they are much better by default already. But then you can also set minimums etc. This will lower your payout, but significantly raise the quality of your ads.
So when a publisher has all those scam ads, it’s either lack of knowledge and care, or a choice.
Google didn’t have this issue until they bought DoubleClick (text ads and they hosted). And they had pretty good privacy as they didn’t want to share shit.
After DC it all went to hell.
That sounds like a problem that Google should have already solved. Maybe that's why "Don't Be Evil" got the boot.
How is that even allowed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Broadcasting_Network
it's like ... "when my vacuum cleaner takes pictures of my wife naked, it should use HTTPS when uploading the pictures to the cloud"
We're beyond holding huge companies accountable. The only way they could be held accountable is if there was personal risk involved for the CEOs. There isn't.
Percentage of global gross revenue like the EU's GDPR does seems to work effectively enough for a scare tactic.
Not with this attitude.
In the US, the government is _owned_ by corporations. To pretend otherwise is naive.
Then the remaining party splinters into groups and you vote out the worst half of those two.
Rinse, repeat.
Are they both bad? Probably.
Are the equally bad? Not even remotely.
If they are caught doing it repeatedly without taking adequate measures to stop it, treat them as an accessory to the crime.
If you're asking technically, well, google made over 400 billion dollars last year, they can spend some of that to figure it out.
Or stop serving ads. Just because it's difficult to do safely doesn't mean you get to just do it anyways because there's profit involved.
That's not required. Google could employ proportionality as many people reviewing what they advertise as, say, National Geographic Magazine.
Sorry, no solution for spam calls/texts.
On the other hand, enabling my Verizon eSIM is a surefire way to receive hourly "Potential Spam" calls, despite giving nobody outside of direct family my US phone number. Thankfully, I've convinced enough of my family to use Signal and we call/text through there instead.
Nowadays, I only turn on the Verizon line if I have to receive an SMS one-time code or call my broker.
Don't think the U.S. will ever solve this problem; people will just say something about privacy, the country's "too big" to combat spam at scale, etc. It's also too easy to get a phone number anonymously. A frequent phenomenon I've witnessed is that when someone blocks a phone number, the same caller contacts them again from a different number with the same area code.
Every landlord should be directly accountable for all crimes committed by their tenants.
Every telco should be directly accountable for all crimes committed by their customers.
Meta should pay damages when their users stalk and harass people.
You wouldn't hold a landlord accountable if it was a surprise that a crime took place, but if they were aware that some of their tenants were committing crimes and just "choosing not to ask about it," they could reasonably be called "accountable."
Telcos are regularly asked to give up information regarding crimes committed by their customers, see the Patriot Act for details - in some sense, we as a country have decided to hold them accountable for this (though, not spam).
Meta have been involved in a whole list of litigation that is at minimum adjacent to stalking/harassment, if not directly involving those things. I would need to look up to be more specific, though.
You say landlords should only have accountability for the crimes of their tenants if they chose to do nothing to prevent their property from being used for crime.
Google doesn't just ignore bad advertisers, they prevent the vast majority of malicious ads and report the worst offenders to law enforcement. Google is already doing far more than what you say immunizes landlords.
You say telcos are in the clear because they give info to law enforcement on demand.
Google also does this, so according to your goalposts, Google is also in the clear.
You say Meta is in the clear because they have been sued for crimes their platform enabled.
Google has also been sued and paid billions in damages.
The standard I'm asking you to generalize is the one I replied to: "hold Google directly accountable for every malicious ad they allow through their network".
If this standard can't generalize to landlords, telcos, Meta and everyone else who has a platform that bad actors abuse, then it's a bogus standard.
If Ad Platforms don't want to be held responsible for the fraud that their platform literally delivered to the victim, then they should have KYC for all of their Customers that pay them money to deliver advertising to their victims. That way, shock fucking horror, someone or something might actually be able to be held responsible.
And if the argument is that there are many ways that scapegoats can be used and shell companies setup to avoid actual responsibility, then we'll know more about the next layer of regulation that's required.
Or we just give up and say that fraud is OK (which, I believe, is the current thinking in the US).