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Being allowed to advertise on someone else's brand, trademark, etc. has been pretty much a cornerstone of online advertising since the birth of online advertisi

Being allowed to advertise on someone else's brand, trademark, etc. has been pretty much a cornerstone of online advertising since the birth of online advertising. It's justified as the way mom-and-pops have any hope at all of competing with big-box names; otherwise, Dan's Local Electronics couldn't show up on searches for Best Buy as a potential micro-targeted local alternative.

deminature 4y ago
I'm not talking about advertising on someone else's brand, I'm talking about advertising AS someone else's brand, or malicious impersonation. The most basic vetting of advertising would catch this, but apparently this is not occurring.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Our observation of what is occurring doesn't match what is occurring. Here's how the vetting you're imagining works: 1. The automated system goes to the advertised site. But Google's IPs are public knowledge, so the site vends a "safe" version to Google's checkers. 2. If Google sends a human being? Same story. That human's coming from a Google IP. 3. Google has a small set of non-Google IPs that they privately use for checking. This process seems to have broken down. My guess is malvertisers have caught wise and have managed to build a good list of those IPs to cloak against Google's back- and side-channel verifies too. In terms of the actual ad copy: I suspect a lot of that is checked automatically, and the rest is often checked by contractors. So you're trying to solve the "Build an AI to understand when something is confusing" problem. There's probably room for improvement here, but it's not as surprising as I wish it were that stuff slips through the cracks at that layer.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    > But Google's IPs are public knowledge You're telling me that even though attackers of various sophistication are able to get clean, residential IPs all the time for nefarious purposes, Google can't do the same? Come on. It's not that they can't, it's that they don't care.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      They definitely can. You underestimate how quickly they are identified as Google ad-check bots by the actors who don't want to be seen.

deminature 4y ago

I'm not talking about advertising on someone else's brand, I'm talking about advertising AS someone else's brand, or malicious impersonation. The most basic vetting of advertising would catch this, but apparently this is not occurring.

shadowgovt 4y ago
Our observation of what is occurring doesn't match what is occurring. Here's how the vetting you're imagining works: 1. The automated system goes to the advertised site. But Google's IPs are public knowledge, so the site vends a "safe" version to Google's checkers. 2. If Google sends a human being? Same story. That human's coming from a Google IP. 3. Google has a small set of non-Google IPs that they privately use for checking. This process seems to have broken down. My guess is malvertisers have caught wise and have managed to build a good list of those IPs to cloak against Google's back- and side-channel verifies too. In terms of the actual ad copy: I suspect a lot of that is checked automatically, and the rest is often checked by contractors. So you're trying to solve the "Build an AI to understand when something is confusing" problem. There's probably room for improvement here, but it's not as surprising as I wish it were that stuff slips through the cracks at that layer.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > But Google's IPs are public knowledge You're telling me that even though attackers of various sophistication are able to get clean, residential IPs all the time for nefarious purposes, Google can't do the same? Come on. It's not that they can't, it's that they don't care.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    They definitely can. You underestimate how quickly they are identified as Google ad-check bots by the actors who don't want to be seen.