This is why you should still be ad-blocking online

Having just pointed out how different Google's advertising-fuelled business is from Facebook's surveillance-fuelled shop, I suppose it's only fair to point out that being distinctly different from, and less evil than, Facebook, doesn't automatically make the crew at Google into paragons of virtue.

Por ejemplo, take this report from Huffpost:

The ad caught Gordon Turner’s eye immediately. It was an official-looking online video encouraging viewers to apply for the “Senior Booster Program,” which entitled those 65 and older to government-issued payments of $1,728. For Turner, a 77-year-old Texan on disability benefits who lives alone and financially supports his elderly mother, that kind of cash could go a long way. So he clicked the ad’s link right away to input his personal information, and he waited.

Unfortunately for Turner — and the more than 10 million others who’ve viewed this video — no such program exists, and no check will be coming in the mail. Behind the Google ad, and hundreds of others like it, is 1111 LLC, a little-known affiliate marketing company run by a former pro MMA fighter from the Canadian prairies. The firm, which also operates a network of pro-Trump news sites and MAGA merch e-shops, has quietly erupted into one of Google’s top-performing and highest-spending political advertisers

1111 LLC has pumped out a deluge of slickly produced videos via Google ads in recent months that promote entirely fabricated government handouts [...] Many of these ads are designed to look like news segments, with miscontextualized footage of President Joe Biden at his desk appearing to sign documents related to the bogus payouts. [...] They have collectively been viewed well over 100 million times in a matter of months, according to public Google data, sparking false hope in an untold number of households nationwide as the coronavirus pandemic drags into its third calendar year.

Shady companies fleecing people online is a story as old as the internet, but what’s noteworthy in this ruse is Google’s complicity. The tech behemoth has pocketed more than $2.2 million from 1111 LLC since September to run ads that cruelly con its own users while flagrantly violating its own policies — and, experts say, federal law.

Dammit, Google, must you?

A while back, I was watching The WAN Show, a weekly tech-focused podcast on Linus Tech Tips, when Linus, a YouTuber who makes a significant chunk of his company's revenue from Google Adsense, opined that ad-blocking was tantamount to theft; if not outright piracy, it was at the very least privateering.

Linus was wrong. There's a false equivalency at work in his argument, in which ads served up by Google are essentially the same thing as the ads that you'd see on network television: a minor nuisance which is borne by the audience in exchange for otherwise-free programming. The problem is that online ads aren't at all the same as the TV ads of the long ago time; online ads are lousy with scams and grift, when they aren't actually installing malware on your system when they're auto-executed by your browser. 

Do you remember cryptojacking? Because I do.

And then there's the creepy surveillance aspect of things; even Google, whose business model is still viable if the link between advertising and surveillance is broken, isn't yet a surveillance-free zone. There's a reason why the U.S. Congress is marking up legislation right now which will mandate a stop to the process; a looming legal problem that Google is trying to get ahead of by making cross-app tracking more difficult, much like Apple has already done.

And even if online ads weren't dangerous to your security, invasive to your privacy, and occasionally outright-illegal scams which Google not only fails to detect, but profits from, online ads are intrusive to the online experience, to a truly obnoxious degree.

Do you remember when a U.S. Congress, who couldn't agree at the time to keep their own fucking lights on, came together to mandate a decibel cap for television ads? Because I do.

Do I like LTT's content? Yes, I do. It their content so good that I'd be willing to give up my privacy, my security, my emotional well-being, and subject any number of desperate people to an endless (and apparently unstoppable) fire-hose of lies, scams, phishing attacks, misinformation, radicalization, and addiction? Yes, addiction; our current epidemic of opiate addicts is a direct consequence of Oxycontin advertisements which were pumped into people's homes, depicting an opiate painkiller as addiction-free, side-effect-free, and totally safe.

BTW, Purdue Pharmaceuticals, who were responsible for that ad campaign? They're desperately trying top settle the resulting class-action wrongful-death lawsuit... so far, without success.

Online ads aren't a relatively-innocuous thing which we endure to get access to free content. They're often dangerous, frequently outright evil, and demand far too much in exchange for showing us a few minutes of a movie trailer on YouTube... which, I'll remind you, is already a fucking advertisement, and shouldn't need to also be supported by selling additional pre- and end-roll ads... or mid-roll ads, for that matter.

So, no, Linus, ad-blocking isn't piracy, or privateering, or theft of any description. It's self-defence. If Google want me to stop blocking the ads they're hosting and serving, then that ad stream needs to be independently certified as 100% clean, by people whose word we can trust on the subject. In other words, not by Google themselves, who have a vested material interest in shading the truth on this subject.

GDPR?

So, when I logged into Blogger today, I was greeted with this notice:

European Union laws require you to give European Union visitors information about cookies used and data collected on your blog. In many cases, these laws also require you to obtain consent.

Out of courtesy, we have added a notice on your blog to explain Google's use of certain Blogger and Google cookies, including use of Google Analytics and AdSense cookies, and other data collected by Google.

You are responsible for confirming that this notice actually works for your blog, and that it displays. If you employ other cookies, for example by adding third-party features, this notice may not work for you. If you include functionality from other providers there may be extra information collected from your users.

Which is... fine, I guess? The weird part is that I have no idea what the notice says, because I'm in Canada, and the notice doesn't appear for Canadian users. Hopefully the thing is actually working, since I have no way to know; blogger's relevent help page says that it should be active automatically, with no action needed from me, which I find to be somewhat at odds with the notice itself, which says that I'm somehow supposed to be responsible for ensuring that it's working, even though I apparently can't do that from here.

If Blogger's default GDPR notice says anything you object to, please direct those objections to Google, who are entirely responsible for the no-doubt-legalese passages in question. If it's not there at all, please feel free to leave a comment on this blog post or something to let me know.

For the record, I have my browser options set to delete all cookies automatically when Firefox closes (and, yes, I use Firefox -  it's what I'm used to, and Quantum's performance is close enough to Chrome's to be acceptable), and to accept third-party cookies only from sites I've already visited. Since Firefox is also set to clear my history when it closes, and since I also run two ad-blockers (uBlock Origin and AdBlocker Ultimate), I feel pretty okay with the level of data that people can collect about me without my knowledge. I'm probably not doing much to slow the the likes of Facebook with their shadow profiles, but I shouldn't be broadcasting much of anything to the world that I'd rather keep quiet.

Remember... it's not paranoia if they are watching you. And they definitely are watching you. C'est la vie.

And now for something completely different

Let's lighten the tone a bit, shall we? How about I stop talking about the evils of Facebook to discuss the stupidity of Google, who have just given YouTube users yet another reason to ad-block. Yes, really.

From Gizmodo:

YouTube, the world largest video streaming platform, wants you to start paying money to watch Kendrick Lamar’s latest music video—and to force the issue, you’ll start seeing a lot more advertisements between specifically music videos.

Bloomberg reported that Lyor Cohen, YouTube’s global head of music, said during a SXSW interview that music video watchers will see advertisement increases the company hopes will annoying the shit out of viewers enough to buy into their new rumored streaming service, Remix.

Specifically, Cohen said:

There’s a lot more people in our funnel that we can frustrate and seduce to become subscribers. Once we do that, trust me, all that noise will be gone, and articles people write about that noise will be gone.

You—yes, you, the YouTube consumer, will be lovingly frustrated by a poor advertising experience, then be seduced into a monthly payment to avoid those unwelcoming ads. Sounds like a great plan: annoy your loyal user base until they pay money to not hate your product.

Was it just this morning that I was praising Google for being far more consumer-focused and consumer-friendly than Facebook? I think it was. And yes, I do feel just a little bit foolish for doing so. Only a little bit, mind you... in the grand scheme of things, this latest bad idea really is just hurting themselves, and not affecting me at all. Still, though, what are they thinking?

Well, apparently they're thinking that they can just target the YouTube version of "whales."

A YouTube spokesperson told Gizmodo in an email that not all users will see more ads, but a “specific subset of users” might.

“Our top priority at YouTube is to deliver a great user experience and that includes ensuring users do not encounter excessive ad loads,” the spokesperson said. “We do not seek to specifically increase ad loads across YouTube. For a specific subset of users who use YouTube like a paid music service today—and would benefit most from additional features—we may show more ads or promotional prompts to upsell to our paid service.”

Yeah... good luck with that, Google.

This is why I ad-block...

...and why I'm not relying on Google's built-in ad-blocker, which (naturally) won't block ads served by their own sites.

ArsTechnica reported on this first, but Gizmodo has a really good article about the problem:

As Ars Technica first reported on Friday, users on social media started complaining earlier this week that YouTube ads were triggering their anti-virus software. Specifically, the software was recognizing a script from a service called CoinHive. The script was originally released as a sort of altruistic idea that would allow sites to make a little extra income by putting a visitor’s CPU processing power to use by mining a cryptocurrency called Monero. This could be used ethically as long as a site notifies its visitors of what’s happening and doesn’t get so greedy with the CPU usage that it crashes a visitor’s computer. In the case of YouTube’s ads running the script, they were reportedly using up to 80 percent of the CPU and neither YouTube nor the user were told what was happening.

[...]

Gizmodo reached out to YouTube for comment on Trend Micro’s claims, and a spokesperson acknowledged the problem:

Mining cryptocurrency through ads is a relatively new form of abuse that violates our policies and one that we’ve been monitoring actively. We enforce our policies through a multi-layered detection system across our platforms which we update as new threats emerge. In this case, the ads were blocked in less than two hours and the malicious actors were quickly removed from our platforms.

The part of the statement about the ads being blocked in less than two hours doesn’t align with Trend Micro’s assessment that the ad campaign has been a problem for at least a week. When we asked YouTube about this discrepancy, a spokesperson declined to comment any further.

But a source with direct knowledge of YouTube’s handling of the situation told Gizmodo that the two-hour measurement was just being applied to each individual ad run by the hackers, not the ads en masse. YouTube approves a clean ad submitted by a clean account set up by the hijacker. When the ad goes live, the attackers use various cloaking methods to subvert YouTube’s system and swap the ad with one that includes the malicious script. A couple hours later, the ad is detected, taken down, and the user who submitted it gets their account deleted. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

I was actually going to give Chrome another try, in part to see how its newly upgraded ad-blocking feature stacked up against uBlock and AdBlocker, but I think I'll be holding off for a while longer. Forget the desirability of the thing, when even sites like YouTube, run by companies as large as Google, are delivering ads loaded with malware, it simply isn't safe to let ads of any kind run in your browser window.

Of course, the more that I become accustomed to ad-free internet, the harder it becomes to ever turn the ads back on. I don't know what sort of an experience Chrome's built-in ad-blocker delivers, but the fact that users like me aren't less and less interested in even trying it anymore, thanks to egregious abuses like cryptojacking, probably spells real trouble for the advertising industry.

And then, of course, there's the problem that advertising doesn't even work anymore:

Sorry, advertisers. It's too bad that you all didn't decide to behave sensibly and ethically, before we developed the ability to simply shut you out completely. Now you have to come up with an ad that can go viral as a stand-alone piece of content, which ad-blocking users will choose to watch, and which still doesn't sell the product it's supposed to be flogging. That Vitamin Water ad may well have introduced the world to Feel It Still, but I it's probably done more for "Portugal. The Man" than it did for Vitamin Water sales, and how much did it cost to hire Aaron Paul for that thing? GG.

What does this mean for the internet that we're used to, filled as it is with "free" content from sites that can only keep operating if they're supported with ad revenue? Honestly, I have no idea. I suspect, though, that we're only a few years away from finding out.

This is why Edge can't take browser market share away from Chrome.

Just last week, I was blogging about Microsoft's latest desperate attempt to trash-talk Google's Chrome browser's battery life, when I wrote this:

Saying that Chrome is a better browser because it includes the features that users want in a modern browser, while providing acceptable battery performance, is not the same as saying that Chrome is perfect. Chrome can still be improved, and Google proved themselves willing to work on improving it [...] Not because they were losing market share, because they weren't and aren't, but because they wanted to keep winning, and saw no reason to concede any part of the field to Microsoft.

I wasn't thinking about ad-blocking, specifically, but built-in ad-blocking is perfectly in line with this kind of thinking. And so, naturally, Google is experimenting with adding build-in ad-blocking to Chrome.

From Gizmodo:

It’s not just you, online ads are getting worse. Auto-play video has become a standard, pop-ups are back in a big way and those inline ads seem accidentally clickier all the time. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is well aware of this and it’s planning to add a built-in ad blocker to the Chrome browser. [...]

The Journal reports that sources familiar with Google’s plan say that both the mobile and desktop versions could soon feature an ad-blocking system that would be turned on by default. But it wouldn’t filter out all ads, only the ones that don’t comply with the Coalition for Better Ads list of standards. For instance, auto-playing video ads with sound and large sticky ads would be out. The company is reportedly still deciding whether or not to block individual ads or all advertising on any site that doesn’t meet the “threshold of consumer acceptability.”

But why would a company that makes billions on advertising add a feature to its own free product that would block advertising? Simply put, Google doesn’t want more people downloading ad-blockers that it has no control over. Google has seen the reports that as many as 26% of desktop users have some sort of software to hide advertisements and it doesn’t want that number getting any larger.

The lack of extensions, or even the ability to add extensions, was one of the things that hurt Edge right out of the blocks. Ad-blocking is just standard practice now, for anybody who values their privacy, security, or just plain sanity; I actually run two different ad-blocking extensions, and would love for Chrome to just build in ad-blocking, so that I can free up those system resources for other things. This, assuming Google follow through on it, is a great, pro-consumer move. 

It's also a feature that Microsoft would absolutely have to add to Edge before they'd have any hope of competing for browser market share. Are you listening, Microsoft? This is what your customers actually want in a web browser. If you add this to Edge before Google adds it to Chrome, then you'll actually have a competitive edge in the browser wars, however briefly... on Windows 10, anyway.

Begun, the adblock wars have

From the Wall Street Journal:

Facebook is going to start forcing ads to appear for all users of its desktop website, even if they use ad-blocking software.

The social network said on Tuesday that it will change the way advertising is loaded into its desktop website to make its ad units considerably more difficult for ad blockers to detect.

“Facebook is ad-supported. Ads are a part of the Facebook experience; they’re not a tack on,” said Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, vice president of Facebook’s ads and business platform.

User adoption of ad-blocking software has grown rapidly in recent years, particularly outside of the U.S. According to estimates by online advertising trade body the Interactive Advertising Bureau, 26% of U.S. internet users now use ad blockers on their desktop devices. Facebook declined to comment when asked on what portion of its desktop users have ad-blocking software installed.

[...]

Some ad-blocking software providers have faced fierce criticism from the media industry for their business models in recent months. Eyeo GmbH, the company behind popular desktop ad-blocking tool Adblock Plus, accepts payment from more than 70 companies in exchange for letting their ads through its filter.

“This is an unfortunate move, because it takes a dark path against user choice,” Eyeo said of Facebook’s ad decision in a blog post. “But it’s also no reason to overreact: cat-and-mouse games in tech have been around as long as spammers have tried to circumvent spam filters.”

Well, we all knew that it was coming... advertisers were going to strike back, and they weren't going to do it by actually adopting more ethical or less invasive practices. It was always going to degenerate into this kind of "arms race," with ad-blockers constantly forced to find new ways to block ever-more-insidious ads. The comparison to spam is perfectly justified, here.

It is interesting that Facebook made this move first, though; I almost expected Google to take this step before anyone else, in spite of their "don't be evil" corporate motto. I guess Facebook is just more evil than Google.