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.

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.