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How exactly are they going to know they're being flagged as bots? When all you're doing is discounting those bot clicks to the advertiser it becomes far more di

by rapind 14y ago

How exactly are they going to know they're being flagged as bots? When all you're doing is discounting those bot clicks to the advertiser it becomes far more difficult to test your limits as a bot (you would need to be a paying advertiser, just to analyze the human to bot threshold). It's similar to hell-banning, in that the user's generally unaware they've been hell-banned. Take a minute to think about the effort a bot account has to go to in order to even come close to gaming a system that tracks their behaviour. Let's assume that in order to be deemed human you need at least a few characteristics like "account older than 1 day", "friends from other non-suspicious accounts", "a photo or at least comments on a friends photos", and a "certain amount of click activity". Now let's take that criteria and make it difficult for a bot to even know if they're being flagged as a bot where the only indication is a reduced bill at the end of the day / week / month to the advertiser. So bot makers would have to pay to test and would at best receive delayed feedback on their success. Isn't this starting to seem extremely difficult, and generally unscalable from a bot perspective? It doesn't have to be impossible, there just needs to be lower hanging fruit, of which there are plenty should FB implement a system like this. And should this fairly simple solution still have a few holes that a very elite few bot coders are able to game, you've still got tons of data and time to use to tune your algos. It just doesn't make sense that one of their advertiser's is being charged for 80% bot clicks, until you start to question Facebooks motivations.

AznHisoka 14y ago
I agree. This is an easy problem, considering FB's resources. Only a logged in FB user can click on ads. Not random crawlers. That alone makes this problem 100 times easier than what Google has to face with invalid clicks. No excuses.
jiggy2011 14y ago
It depends whether the bots are creating accounts or hijacking existing ones (via browser plugins or whatnot). The bots will not be able to get accurate statistics without paying, but they might be able to get "good enough" statistics. For example, is the system moving in a direction we like. If you do need to pay , a good bot herder probably has enough stolen credit cards to use. Yes, there are certainly mitigation techniques. But like other spam/bot related problems it becomes an arms race. You only need 1 good bot programmer to release his bot online for thousands of budding script kiddies to take advantage of.
- rapind 14y ago
  Hijacking browsers? We're getting pretty sophisticated and far fetched. If you've hijacked someone's browser there are many better ways to make a profit than spiking a competitors ad buys. So basically we've narrowed down the potentially bot makers to: 1) Has a way to hijack thousands of facebook user's browsers, and is more interested in spiking some companies ad buys than other profitable activities they could be doing. 2) Has access to stolen credit cards so they can spend the money required to debug and test their bot's humanity against the defensive algorithms. Spending money in order to indirectly make money because some company is paying them to spike a competitor's ad buys. Obviously this is going to cut into their margins, so the amount they spend should be less than they're being paid. 3) Has the patience and dedication to analyze the bills when they come in to determine how much of their activity is considered botlike and then tweak their behaviour accordingly. 4) Thousands of budding script kiddies are also being payed by companies to spike their competitor's ad buys. 5) Rides a unicorn? Don't forget there also needs to be companies willing to pay someone to make these bots and don't mind how incredibly difficult it would be to measure it's success. In fact, if there are companies willing to pay for this, then you're going to have a whole bunch of scammers who simply claim they're able to do it that the companies will have to filter out. We're incredibly far into the realm of unprofitability and edge-casery don't you think? An alien spaceship is going to land in my backyard before this happens.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    Not really, this is just off the top of my head and I'm sufficiently unfamiliar with bot programming and FB advertising that I'm sure that plenty of better solutions must exist. You are forgetting that there are growing numbers of programmers in developing nations for whom doing this sort of thing can be an attractive way to earn a living (or at least they are willing to try it). Look on any "hire a freelancer" type sites and you will find hundreds of postings for tasks that sound awfully like scamware development (usually at a couple of dollars an hour). Browser hijacking is not so uncommon either, I've installed legit software in the past that has come bundled with some crapware that injects extra adverts into web-pages and other things. The analysis would not be too difficult either, simply set a "click rate" and adjust it downwards until you are being charged > $0. Do facebook offer any method to get free trail credits? If so this could be abused, heavily. The economics are roughly the same as with spam, if you do enough of it your "hit rate" doesn't matter so much.
deleted 14y ago
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by rapind 14y ago

AznHisoka 14y ago

I agree. This is an easy problem, considering FB's resources. Only a logged in FB user can click on ads. Not random crawlers. That alone makes this problem 100 times easier than what Google has to face with invalid clicks. No excuses.

jiggy2011 14y ago

It depends whether the bots are creating accounts or hijacking existing ones (via browser plugins or whatnot). The bots will not be able to get accurate statistics without paying, but they might be able to get "good enough" statistics. For example, is the system moving in a direction we like. If you do need to pay , a good bot herder probably has enough stolen credit cards to use. Yes, there are certainly mitigation techniques. But like other spam/bot related problems it becomes an arms race. You only need 1 good bot programmer to release his bot online for thousands of budding script kiddies to take advantage of.

rapind 14y ago
Hijacking browsers? We're getting pretty sophisticated and far fetched. If you've hijacked someone's browser there are many better ways to make a profit than spiking a competitors ad buys. So basically we've narrowed down the potentially bot makers to: 1) Has a way to hijack thousands of facebook user's browsers, and is more interested in spiking some companies ad buys than other profitable activities they could be doing. 2) Has access to stolen credit cards so they can spend the money required to debug and test their bot's humanity against the defensive algorithms. Spending money in order to indirectly make money because some company is paying them to spike a competitor's ad buys. Obviously this is going to cut into their margins, so the amount they spend should be less than they're being paid. 3) Has the patience and dedication to analyze the bills when they come in to determine how much of their activity is considered botlike and then tweak their behaviour accordingly. 4) Thousands of budding script kiddies are also being payed by companies to spike their competitor's ad buys. 5) Rides a unicorn? Don't forget there also needs to be companies willing to pay someone to make these bots and don't mind how incredibly difficult it would be to measure it's success. In fact, if there are companies willing to pay for this, then you're going to have a whole bunch of scammers who simply claim they're able to do it that the companies will have to filter out. We're incredibly far into the realm of unprofitability and edge-casery don't you think? An alien spaceship is going to land in my backyard before this happens.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Not really, this is just off the top of my head and I'm sufficiently unfamiliar with bot programming and FB advertising that I'm sure that plenty of better solutions must exist. You are forgetting that there are growing numbers of programmers in developing nations for whom doing this sort of thing can be an attractive way to earn a living (or at least they are willing to try it). Look on any "hire a freelancer" type sites and you will find hundreds of postings for tasks that sound awfully like scamware development (usually at a couple of dollars an hour). Browser hijacking is not so uncommon either, I've installed legit software in the past that has come bundled with some crapware that injects extra adverts into web-pages and other things. The analysis would not be too difficult either, simply set a "click rate" and adjust it downwards until you are being charged > $0. Do facebook offer any method to get free trail credits? If so this could be abused, heavily. The economics are roughly the same as with spam, if you do enough of it your "hit rate" doesn't matter so much.

deleted 14y ago

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