7 ms·

I Used Google Ads for Social Engineering

80 points by tysone 7y ago

rahimnathwani 7y ago
The article is not as interesting as I had guessed from the title, because: 1. It's not about the infosec meaning of social engineering, i.e. the author wasn't trying to get login credenials or system access. 2. It's loosely related to the other meaning of social engineering (causing deliberate societal change), but the author's attempted influence was limited to individuals (getting them to call a hotline). A better title might be 'how I got 28% conversion for an ad landing page whose CTA was a phone call'.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  Ads where you target a small number of people are of course cheap, making pranks like [1] possible for next to no cost. The interesting thing is can you cheaply run campaigns on influential people such a CEOs and politicians. I think you probably could! [1] https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/ https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking...
tbabb 7y ago
I am disappointed that the author ended on a "this is bad" message for something with such clear potential for good. Instead of tearing down, why did the author not apply the very thing he learned and use his article's influence and the power of suggestion to influence more people to use this tool positively?
- philwelch 7y ago
  Because the NYT has finally realized that the tech industry in general and Google in particular are direct competitors and existential threats to their business. This is also the explanation for every other hit piece the mainstream media writes about the tech industry.
  - SquishyPanda23 7y ago
    I know it's comforting to think that journalists draw attention to issues with tech because we're tOtALlY dEStRoYIng ThEiR bUsSiNeSs MoDeL. But does this trope really need to be pulled out in discussing every single newspiece about tech that isn't flattering? It doesn't add anything to the conversation that hasn't been said thousands of times, and it fans the flames of anti-journalist sentiment.
    - izacus 7y ago
      It will have to be pulled out for as long as journalists keep writing these biased hit pieces to push their political agenda. Critiquing tech industry for all the wrong they do is fine. But what NYT does is target two companies and constantly writes articles that find the most negative interpretation to the point where they sometimes even invent things. Being biased and running a smear campaign against their competitor is what fans anti-journalist sentiment, not people bringing up the bias.
    - philwelch 7y ago
      > But does this trope really need to be pulled out in discussing every single newspiece about tech that isn't flattering? When it comes to dishonest hit pieces like this one, it is the only constructive comment to make. If journalists want to be respected, they should produce respectable work. TFA ain't it.
      - claudiulodro 7y ago
        This is an opinion piece by an SEO consultant.
        philwelch 7y ago
        Publish, then.
    - repolfx 7y ago
      What's wrong with "fanning the flames of anti-journalist sentiment" exactly? If journalists aren't meeting the basic requirements society has of them, shouldn't there correctly be such sentiment? How else would journalism be motivated to self-reform?
- hrobok 7y ago
  "How I deprogrammed thousands of Trump supporters with this one weird trick."
  - hrobok 7y ago
    "how I saved many babies with my $100 ad campaign near my local Planned Parenthood."
- yo-scot-99 7y ago
  I read it more as a "here's the keys to the kingdom" and referenced the redirectMethod which even has a step-by-step guide to replicate it. The author is from a search engine marketing consulting firm so it would seem to be almost against his self-interest to lay bare these tactics.
- sushid 7y ago
  The author's point is that although the author only used it for morally unambiguously good deeds, there are always malicious actors and those who believe that their side of argument is "good" (e.g. extreme left and right political ideologies). The author believes that there should indeed be some manual review for sensitive issues like these. What if an ad buyer bought ads for AR15s or for bulk order sleeping pills? You can argue that those buyers should be caught and tried, but the harm would be already done. The author would like more oversight from Google and those alike before malicious state actors (gasp!) and/or sick individuals use this unchecked power for bad.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    > What if an ad buyer bought ads for AR15s Yeah, what if? It's a perfectly legal product in my country and people do buy and sell them online (via FFL transfers rather than directly), and the vast majority of people who own and use those rifles do so safely.
skummetmaelk 7y ago
> More than 50 percent of people still can’t differentiate between an ad (redirect or not) and an organic result on Google. Just wow.
- newsbinator 7y ago
  Most people can't tell the difference between an email from Apple and an email from someone with a "from: line" of "Apple". Most people use Google.com to search for Youtube.com.
  - TheChaplain 7y ago
    My mother did the latter, until I showed her how to use bookmarks and changed the start page to chrome://bookmarks/ She's happy and said "Internet is faster now" :o)
- austhrow743 7y ago
  Its probably a good idea to treat most first page results on google as ads anyway.
- buboard 7y ago
  i wonder how many ppl can differentiate between a paid article and a 'real' one
- kerng 7y ago
  This is deliberate on Google's end. In fact they keep bluring the line between ads and search results with updates more and more.
  - kerng 7y ago
    The blind downvoting on anything critical/objective about Google is really frustrating on HN.
  - MrMember 7y ago
    They're doing this more and more in the Gmail Android app as well. First there were no ads. Then they added ads to the top of the mail list. Now they're interspersing ads between emails. I finally switched to K-9 because of how intrusive it became.
buboard 7y ago
Ads work. In other news, water is wet. Brought to you by the NYTimes (TM) NYtimes seems hellbent on convincing people that any information that is not vetted by other humans of authority (preferably themselves) is a danger to society that must be banned. Fits the purpose of a medium that wants control over society. Then again most of us know that the internet is a wild west and thats why we loved it. I know that HN loves them, but this path and the logic behind it is sinister and backwards.
- AznHisoka 7y ago
  Ad campaigns are not effective campaigns unless they manipulate searcher's behaviors. As you said, water is wet. Ads manipulate. That's the definition of an ad, NY Times.
  - repolfx 7y ago
    No, that's not how online ads work or why Google makes money. Recall that AdWords is a money tree because online advertising by and large does not work but targeted search ads - emphasis on targeted - do. But targeted to what? They only work if they're targeted to commercial queries and basically are useful. Google has lots of systems in place to boost useful ads, defined as someone clicked it and didn't come back to keep searching or an ad that triggered a conversion action. It also demotes non useful ads, e.g. ads that aren't properly targeted. Ad campaigns thus don't "manipulate searcher's behaviours": if that were true, there'd be no need for Google to do anything about low quality or irrelevant ads as the mere act of seeing an ad would automatically make it relevant. People start doing commercial searches already knowing what they want, and ads are in a way a solution to the problem that the best organic PageRanked result for a query like 'flowers' might be a Wikipedia page on flowers, whereas almost certainly what the user actually wanted was a hyper-local result for a flower delivery service. Such services don't tend to accumulate much PageRank anyway, so need to be ranked some other way like via an auction. The rest of online advertising is no more able to manipulate people than billboards are. They raise awareness, if they're clever and memorable. That's about it. Brands that people know about do better than brands that people don't, unless that brand is good enough to spread via word of mouth, in which case they can win without advertising entirely. Which is how Google itself grew for most of its history.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nixarian 7y ago
>“One sentence could have stopped me,” Kevin wrote. “Had any one of the hundreds of passers-by engaged with me, it would … potentially have showed me that I had the ability to choose life.” >No person stopped Kevin from trying to kill himself. Could a Google ad have? No one wanted to save another human...but maybe we could get a robot to do it? Is this what they call "peak capitalism"?
yo-scot-99 7y ago
A couple of meta questions for the HN community: 1. What percent of HN readers have a NYT subscription? 2. There are far more comments here than the source -- is that appropriate? Should the comments ride along w/ the article (for future reference and the fact that they paid for the orginal story/reporting)
Jerry2 7y ago
>Those who bear the brunt of that abuse aren’t just the impatient and impulsive. More than 50 percent of people still can’t differentiate between an ad (redirect or not) and an organic result on Google. Some reasarch [0] suggests the figure is much higher and around 60% (from 2017). Over the past 12-13 years, Google has been steadily making changes as to how they display ads to make them more and more invisible to the user. See the graphic [1]. By making them more invisible, there's a greater chance that they'll get clicked on and make Google more money. With each change, Google probably added tens of billions of dollars in revenue. [0] https://www.smartinsights.com/paid-search-marketing-ppc/paid-search-strategy/customers-dont-know-a-google-advert/ https://www.smartinsights.com/paid-search-marketing-ppc/paid... [1] http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2016/07/google-ad-shading-labeling-history-update-2017.png http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2016/07/...
Lowkeyloki 7y ago
The Redirect Method sounds like it may be one of Jigsaw's projects. Jigsaw recently got some bad press you may find interesting.[0] Also, there was a similar experiment done in targeted ads on Facebook not too long ago.[1] [0] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb98pb/google-jigsaw-became-toxic-mess https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb98pb/google-jigsaw-beca... [1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-the-secret-facebook-war-for-mormon-hearts-and-minds https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-the-secret-facebook-war...

80 points by tysone 7y ago

The article is not as interesting as I had guessed from the title, because: 1. It's not about the infosec meaning of social engineering, i.e. the author wasn't trying to get login credenials or system access. 2. It's loosely related to the other meaning of social engineering (causing deliberate societal change), but the author's attempted influence was limited to individuals (getting them to call a hotline). A better title might be 'how I got 28% conversion for an ad landing page whose CTA was a phone call'.

quickthrower2 7y ago
Ads where you target a small number of people are of course cheap, making pranks like [1] possible for next to no cost. The interesting thing is can you cheaply run campaigns on influential people such a CEOs and politicians. I think you probably could! [1] https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/ https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking...

tbabb 7y ago

I am disappointed that the author ended on a "this is bad" message for something with such clear potential for good. Instead of tearing down, why did the author not apply the very thing he learned and use his article's influence and the power of suggestion to influence more people to use this tool positively?

philwelch 7y ago
Because the NYT has finally realized that the tech industry in general and Google in particular are direct competitors and existential threats to their business. This is also the explanation for every other hit piece the mainstream media writes about the tech industry.
- SquishyPanda23 7y ago
  I know it's comforting to think that journalists draw attention to issues with tech because we're tOtALlY dEStRoYIng ThEiR bUsSiNeSs MoDeL. But does this trope really need to be pulled out in discussing every single newspiece about tech that isn't flattering? It doesn't add anything to the conversation that hasn't been said thousands of times, and it fans the flames of anti-journalist sentiment.
  - izacus 7y ago
    It will have to be pulled out for as long as journalists keep writing these biased hit pieces to push their political agenda. Critiquing tech industry for all the wrong they do is fine. But what NYT does is target two companies and constantly writes articles that find the most negative interpretation to the point where they sometimes even invent things. Being biased and running a smear campaign against their competitor is what fans anti-journalist sentiment, not people bringing up the bias.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    > But does this trope really need to be pulled out in discussing every single newspiece about tech that isn't flattering? When it comes to dishonest hit pieces like this one, it is the only constructive comment to make. If journalists want to be respected, they should produce respectable work. TFA ain't it.
    - claudiulodro 7y ago
      This is an opinion piece by an SEO consultant.
      - philwelch 7y ago
        Publish, then.
  - repolfx 7y ago
    What's wrong with "fanning the flames of anti-journalist sentiment" exactly? If journalists aren't meeting the basic requirements society has of them, shouldn't there correctly be such sentiment? How else would journalism be motivated to self-reform?
hrobok 7y ago
"How I deprogrammed thousands of Trump supporters with this one weird trick."
- hrobok 7y ago
  "how I saved many babies with my $100 ad campaign near my local Planned Parenthood."
yo-scot-99 7y ago
I read it more as a "here's the keys to the kingdom" and referenced the redirectMethod which even has a step-by-step guide to replicate it. The author is from a search engine marketing consulting firm so it would seem to be almost against his self-interest to lay bare these tactics.
sushid 7y ago
The author's point is that although the author only used it for morally unambiguously good deeds, there are always malicious actors and those who believe that their side of argument is "good" (e.g. extreme left and right political ideologies). The author believes that there should indeed be some manual review for sensitive issues like these. What if an ad buyer bought ads for AR15s or for bulk order sleeping pills? You can argue that those buyers should be caught and tried, but the harm would be already done. The author would like more oversight from Google and those alike before malicious state actors (gasp!) and/or sick individuals use this unchecked power for bad.
- philwelch 7y ago
  > What if an ad buyer bought ads for AR15s Yeah, what if? It's a perfectly legal product in my country and people do buy and sell them online (via FFL transfers rather than directly), and the vast majority of people who own and use those rifles do so safely.

skummetmaelk 7y ago

> More than 50 percent of people still can’t differentiate between an ad (redirect or not) and an organic result on Google. Just wow.

newsbinator 7y ago
Most people can't tell the difference between an email from Apple and an email from someone with a "from: line" of "Apple". Most people use Google.com to search for Youtube.com.
- TheChaplain 7y ago
  My mother did the latter, until I showed her how to use bookmarks and changed the start page to chrome://bookmarks/ She's happy and said "Internet is faster now" :o)
austhrow743 7y ago
Its probably a good idea to treat most first page results on google as ads anyway.
buboard 7y ago
i wonder how many ppl can differentiate between a paid article and a 'real' one
kerng 7y ago
This is deliberate on Google's end. In fact they keep bluring the line between ads and search results with updates more and more.
- kerng 7y ago
  The blind downvoting on anything critical/objective about Google is really frustrating on HN.
- MrMember 7y ago
  They're doing this more and more in the Gmail Android app as well. First there were no ads. Then they added ads to the top of the mail list. Now they're interspersing ads between emails. I finally switched to K-9 because of how intrusive it became.

buboard 7y ago

Ads work. In other news, water is wet. Brought to you by the NYTimes (TM) NYtimes seems hellbent on convincing people that any information that is not vetted by other humans of authority (preferably themselves) is a danger to society that must be banned. Fits the purpose of a medium that wants control over society. Then again most of us know that the internet is a wild west and thats why we loved it. I know that HN loves them, but this path and the logic behind it is sinister and backwards.

AznHisoka 7y ago
Ad campaigns are not effective campaigns unless they manipulate searcher's behaviors. As you said, water is wet. Ads manipulate. That's the definition of an ad, NY Times.
- repolfx 7y ago
  No, that's not how online ads work or why Google makes money. Recall that AdWords is a money tree because online advertising by and large does not work but targeted search ads - emphasis on targeted - do. But targeted to what? They only work if they're targeted to commercial queries and basically are useful. Google has lots of systems in place to boost useful ads, defined as someone clicked it and didn't come back to keep searching or an ad that triggered a conversion action. It also demotes non useful ads, e.g. ads that aren't properly targeted. Ad campaigns thus don't "manipulate searcher's behaviours": if that were true, there'd be no need for Google to do anything about low quality or irrelevant ads as the mere act of seeing an ad would automatically make it relevant. People start doing commercial searches already knowing what they want, and ads are in a way a solution to the problem that the best organic PageRanked result for a query like 'flowers' might be a Wikipedia page on flowers, whereas almost certainly what the user actually wanted was a hyper-local result for a flower delivery service. Such services don't tend to accumulate much PageRank anyway, so need to be ranked some other way like via an auction. The rest of online advertising is no more able to manipulate people than billboards are. They raise awareness, if they're clever and memorable. That's about it. Brands that people know about do better than brands that people don't, unless that brand is good enough to spread via word of mouth, in which case they can win without advertising entirely. Which is how Google itself grew for most of its history.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

nixarian 7y ago

>“One sentence could have stopped me,” Kevin wrote. “Had any one of the hundreds of passers-by engaged with me, it would … potentially have showed me that I had the ability to choose life.” >No person stopped Kevin from trying to kill himself. Could a Google ad have? No one wanted to save another human...but maybe we could get a robot to do it? Is this what they call "peak capitalism"?

yo-scot-99 7y ago

A couple of meta questions for the HN community: 1. What percent of HN readers have a NYT subscription? 2. There are far more comments here than the source -- is that appropriate? Should the comments ride along w/ the article (for future reference and the fact that they paid for the orginal story/reporting)

Jerry2 7y ago

>Those who bear the brunt of that abuse aren’t just the impatient and impulsive. More than 50 percent of people still can’t differentiate between an ad (redirect or not) and an organic result on Google. Some reasarch [0] suggests the figure is much higher and around 60% (from 2017). Over the past 12-13 years, Google has been steadily making changes as to how they display ads to make them more and more invisible to the user. See the graphic [1]. By making them more invisible, there's a greater chance that they'll get clicked on and make Google more money. With each change, Google probably added tens of billions of dollars in revenue. [0] https://www.smartinsights.com/paid-search-marketing-ppc/paid-search-strategy/customers-dont-know-a-google-advert/ https://www.smartinsights.com/paid-search-marketing-ppc/paid... [1] http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2016/07/google-ad-shading-labeling-history-update-2017.png http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2016/07/...

Lowkeyloki 7y ago

The Redirect Method sounds like it may be one of Jigsaw's projects. Jigsaw recently got some bad press you may find interesting.[0] Also, there was a similar experiment done in targeted ads on Facebook not too long ago.[1] [0] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb98pb/google-jigsaw-became-toxic-mess https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb98pb/google-jigsaw-beca... [1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-the-secret-facebook-war-for-mormon-hearts-and-minds https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-the-secret-facebook-war...