Google Profits from Malware | Hacker News Reader

Google Profits from Malware

donnafontenot.com

9 pointsScottBurson7 comments

As the blog author herself has said (elsewhere, in a forum post that led me to the blog post), this is old, old, old news, but maybe it needs to be new news again.

I got fooled by one of these yesterday -- the first time in many years. If you want to see the page that fooled me, here's a screen shot: http://www.ergy.com/Synergy-screen-IE.png

I have been in communication with the owner of the site on which the ad was shown. Since our exchange is public anyway (it's in a Google Group) I will take the liberty of posting an excerpt of his reply here:

It is possible for us to block individual ads in the Google AdSense, and indeed I spent a fair few hours one day some time ago individually disabling the green-button-download-ads. From memory I'd say I disabled around 500 of them- it took me a while anyway. Unfortunately the next day many new ads appeared- and same again the next day, etc. Turns out its impossible to stop them unless you have hours a day spare to disable ads. I have complained to Google, but I imagine since this is so lucrative for them, it wouldn't make financial sense to stop it.

I have tried many ways of solving this issue: using other ad providers, disabling the ads and asking for donations instead, blocking entire AdSense categories. Unfortunately each one of those "solutions" drastically reduced the amount of funding raised for the project, to the point where we'd be underfunded. So for the time being, I'm sorry to say the ads are here to stay.

I was under the impression that Google tries to block ads from malware sites. Well, they don't seem to be trying hard enough. It isn't even possible for site owners who want to opt out of malware profits to do so.

Since you can't escape the problem, maybe it might be a good idea for sites like these to make it clear where the ads are. Something similar to the yellow/orange Ad tag on Google Search would make it clear which download buttons are ads and which ones are the ones you want.

Yes, in fact, I've asked the site owner if he could at least tweak the page to visually separate the ad from the page content. We'll see if he does anything.

"I have tried many ways of solving this issue: using other ad providers, disabling the ads and asking for donations instead, blocking entire AdSense categories. Unfortunately each one of those 'solutions' drastically reduced the amount of funding raised for the project, to the point where we'd be underfunded. So for the time being, I'm sorry to say the ads are here to stay."

In other words, they're knowingly and deliberately exposing their site's visitors to malware to fund their project.

And that's why I feel no guilt when I block ads in my browser.

Unless this guy runs every ad-supported site on the Internet, I don't see how this has anything to do with feeling "no guilt"

This guy is running ads provided by Google, which also supplies ads to many other web sites. And if Google is distributing malware, other ad providers probably are too.

Everyone who runs third-party ads on their site also knows that they're serving up malware. Or if they don't know, they're probably using ad blockers themselves, or they live in an isolated bubble and never met someone whose machine got infected because their kid clicked on the wrong ad.

And I'm happy to pay money for non-ad-supported sites if their services are useful to me.

That's explicitly not the situation described in his post and your comment. As you yourself quoted in your previous comment, he did try things that stopped malware from being shown on his site, but wasn't willing to take the accompanying revenue hit. I know you didn't misunderstand the situation, because that was your whole complaint! (that he knows he could remove malware but isn't willing to do so because it's more profitable to continue advertising it). This means that there _are_ ways to avoid knowingly advertising malware, and unless this guy runs every site on the Web, your rationalization for feeling no guilt is based on flawed logic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com