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I don't want them to be moral police, but they should be held accountable when they are a silent partner in a shady business. It's just like pawn shops. After

I don't want them to be moral police, but they should be held accountable when they are a silent partner in a shady business. It's just like pawn shops. After being robbed I realized that pawn shops entire business model is built on people who have stolen something and are happy to get any amount of money for what they had stolen. What pawnshops do isn't illegal, but if you spend more than 5m in a pawnshop, you realize they wouldn't exist if it weren't for drug addicts who needed their next fix. I witnessed someone walk in with a backpack full of random stuff. The people working the counter clearly knew her, they asked jokingly: "who's bag is that?" her response: "it's yours now". This is the secret of of facebook and google. This is what powers self driving cars and AI and massages at work and "moonshots". If the best defense of your actions is "it's not technically illegal", you might want to reassess your business model.

bllguo 9y ago
The key is that Google's business model is not built on people that are behaving illegally. Google would obviously still exist if rehab scammers and other bad actors didn't. Given this, I find your call for Google to reassess its business model a weak one. People just want short-term, feel-good solutions. Google monitoring for shady rehab ads is exactly that. It's a kneejerk reaction that doesn't solve the real issues. These centers will still exist and inevitably ads will slip through the cracks. This is a failure of society and law enforcement that just happens to be most visible thru Google.
- anonacct37 9y ago
  > Google would obviously still exist if rehab scammers and other bad actors didn't. It's not obvious to me that google, in it's current insanely profitable form, would exist. As someone who has worked in ad-tech I think you might be underestimating how much of their money comes from rehab scammers, predatory lenders, get rich quick scams, weight loss scams, etc. Unfortunately I can't publish the numbers even if I still had them, but as an engineer looking through logs and building our tracking system I remember our biggest clients and who was paying us $400/lead. These companies are key business partners of google/facebook. They write the checks. I'm not advocating going after google as a short term solution to a failure in law enforcement. I'm advocating holding them responsible as a business partner to share in whatever consequences our law enforcement system deems appropriate.

bllguo 9y ago

The key is that Google's business model is not built on people that are behaving illegally. Google would obviously still exist if rehab scammers and other bad actors didn't. Given this, I find your call for Google to reassess its business model a weak one. People just want short-term, feel-good solutions. Google monitoring for shady rehab ads is exactly that. It's a kneejerk reaction that doesn't solve the real issues. These centers will still exist and inevitably ads will slip through the cracks. This is a failure of society and law enforcement that just happens to be most visible thru Google.

anonacct37 9y ago
> Google would obviously still exist if rehab scammers and other bad actors didn't. It's not obvious to me that google, in it's current insanely profitable form, would exist. As someone who has worked in ad-tech I think you might be underestimating how much of their money comes from rehab scammers, predatory lenders, get rich quick scams, weight loss scams, etc. Unfortunately I can't publish the numbers even if I still had them, but as an engineer looking through logs and building our tracking system I remember our biggest clients and who was paying us $400/lead. These companies are key business partners of google/facebook. They write the checks. I'm not advocating going after google as a short term solution to a failure in law enforcement. I'm advocating holding them responsible as a business partner to share in whatever consequences our law enforcement system deems appropriate.