Tag: online advertising

Very often I have read articles from European sources about the Silicon Valley companies not respecting European values like privacy. This ends up with the European Commission taking legal action against the powerful Silicon Valley tech kings like Facebook or Google, ending up with placing requirements or levying fines on these companies.

But what can Europe also do to resolve these issues?

They could encourage European-based companies to work on Internet services like Web-search, social networking, file storage and the like that compete with what Silicon Valley offers. But what they offer can be about services that respect European personal and business values like democracy, privacy and transparency.

There has been some success in this field in the aerospace industry with Airbus rising up to challenge Boeing. This was more evident with Airbus releasing the A380 high-capacity double-decker long-haul jet and Boeing offering the 787 Dreamliner jet that was focused on saving energy. Let’s not forget the rise of Arianespace in France who established a competing space program to what NASA offered.

But why are the Europeans concerned about Silicon Valley’s behaviour? Part of it is to do with Continental Europe’s darkest time in modern history where there was the rise of the Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin dictatorships, underscored by Hitler’s Germany taking over significant areas in France and Eastern Europe before the Second World War. This was followed up with the Cold War where most of Eastern Europe was effectively a group of communist dictatorships loyal to the Soviet Union. In both these situations, the affected countries were run as police states where their national security services were conducting mass surveillance at the behest of the country’s dictator.

There are a few of these businesses putting themselves on the map. Of course we known that Spotify, the main worldwide online jukebox, is based in Sweden. But Sweden, the land of ABBA, Volvo, IKEA, Electrolux and  Assa Abloy, also has CloudMe, a cloud-based file-storage service on their soil. It is also alongside SoundCloud, the go-to audio-content server for Internet-based talent, which is based in Germany. The French also put their foot in the IoT space with a smart lock retrofit kit that has Web management with its server based in France.

A few search engines are setting up shop in Europe with Unbubble.eu (German) and StartPage (Dutch) metasearch engines in operation and Qwant and Findx search engines that create their own indexes. But the gaps that I have noticed here is the existence of a social network or display ad platform that are based in Europe and support the European personal and business values.

There are also the issues associated with competing heavily against the Silicon Valley giants, such as establishing presence in the European or global market and defining your brand. Here, they would have to identify those people and businesses in Europe and the world who place emphasis on the distinct European values and know how to effectively compete against the established brands.

The European Commission could help companies competing with the Silicon Valley IT establishment by providing information and other aid along with providing a list of European-based companies who can compete with this establishment. They could also underpin research and development efforts for these companies who want to innovate in a competitive field. It can also include the ability for multiple companies in the IT, consumer-electronics and allied fields to work towards establishing services that can have a stronger market presence and compete effectively with Silicon Valley.

Article

Advertising of predatory financial services

Google Will Start Banning All Ads From Payday Lenders | Mashable

Advertising of online tech-support scams

Bing brings in blanket ban on online tech support ads | Naked Security

My Comments

Google clamps down on advertising of predatory financial services

An issue that has caused a lot of concern with the Global Financial Crisis is the existence of predatory sub-prime financing services like payday and other short-term loans. This issue has been raised as a civil rights issue as well as a consumer-protection issue because predatory lending occurs more with disadvantaged communities and the kind of loan products charge exorbitant amounts of interest.

Google has attacked this issue by prohibiting payday and similar lenders from advertising through their Adwords search-advertising platform. As far as I know, it doesn’t affect any of Google’s display advertising services like Adsense or Admob. This follows similar action that Facebook had taken concerning their online advertising platform, with both these companies being the biggest online advertising platforms encompassing both their own properties and the ad networks that serve other publishers and mobile app developers. It is part of Silicon Valley’s reaction to contemporary issues of concern like civil rights.

This will effect the advertising of loan products that are due within 60 days or have an interest rate of 36% or more in the USA. But the issue that may surface is whether Google will apply this rule to their display advertising networks and if other online advertising services will follow suit and apply it across their products.

Bing clamping down on online tech-support scams

I have given a fair bit of airtime on HomeNetworking01.info about the online tech-support scams due to hearing from people in my community who have had near misses with these scams.

This typically manifested in the form of the phone calls that people received from someone pretending to be the tech-support team associated with a respected IT or telecommunications name, stating that the user’s computer has a virus or something else is wrong with the user’s computer hardware or software.  But they lead you to establish a remote-access path to your computer so they can “fix” the perceived “problem” or “threat” for a fee, with these scammers making off with a large sum of money or installing software of questionable provenance and relevance on your computer.

Most of us have become aware of these scams through the various customer-education efforts by the IT community and consumer-protection organisations, encouraging us to seek IT support from people whom you know and have met in person like your business’s IT department or the IT experts in your household, family or community.

This has led to computer users not answering these calls or simply hanging up when they receive those calls. Now the scammers’ MO has changed towards cost-per-click Web ads or popups that flash up warning messages saying that your computer has problems and instructing you to call a toll-free number. This plays on the fact that you are seeking a problem to be rectified by placing that phone call.

Bing Ads, which is part of Microsoft’s Bing search platform, have banned the advertisement of third-party tech-support services because of the quality issues that are affecting end-users’ data safety. There has been an unintended consequence from this ruling which has made it hard for honest IT-support providers to advertise their services on that platform.

Conclusion

I see it as one of many efforts by the online advertising industry to clean up its act and gain the same level of respect as traditional advertising but there could be a more uniform approach to the problem of questionable online and mobile advertising.

The only way I see this coming about is for the industry to adopt a code of practice with conformance being indicated to end-users, publishers, content-filter software and others through distinct trademarks and symbols. This could address issues like advertising that is allowed, the kinds of ad contracts offered including the tenure of these contracts and the kind of payment received, due-diligence requirements, and liaison with law enforcement, customer protection and other authorities.

Article

Beware of Risky Ads on Tumblr | MalwareBytes Unpacked

My Comments

Ads on sites like here need to be secure to obtain the same respect as magazine ads

Most of us who use the Web are making increased use of ad-sponsored Web sites for news, blogs, social media and the like.

In most cases, the banner advertising that appears on these Websites or on advertising-funded mobile-platform apps and is delivered in a tasteful manner provide a similar experience to the display advertising we see, accept and take for granted in newspapers, magazines and other printed media. That is where pop-up or pop-under advertising isn’t used or you don’t hear noisy video commercials playing through. It could be enough to see an animated or slide-show ad appear within the confines of the banner. Here, the advertising doesn’t interrupt the reading experience unlike with TV advertising or online-video advertising where it interrupts the viewing experience.

Such advertising, like the Google AdSense ads you see on this site, is sold on a contract that is based on cost-per-click which the advertiser pays when you click on the ad to follow through with it, or cost-per-impression which is based on simply on the ad being loaded and appearing on the site.

The malvertisement threat

But there is a security problem cropping up here in the form of “malvertisements”. These are online advertisements that are delivered to lead users to Websites that host malware. Typically they use enticing copy and graphics in the advertisements to attract users to view content on these sites and download software of questionable provenance.

Security vendors run a rhetoric that encourages us Web users to use ad-blocking software to keep our computer secure by masking all online advertising. But this can get in the way of honest advertisers and the publications that depend on them for revenue because the software works on an “all or nothing” approach.

But what can the online advertising industry do about this?

If a Website author has control over all of the advertising they admit, they can easily “fence out” malvertisements and distasteful advertising by examining what their potential advertiser is tendering at the start of and through the life of their advertising contract.

But this is not the case for most Websites where they will rely on one or more ad networks like Google AdSense to supply all or the remainder of their ad inventory. These ad networks typically source the advertising themselves and pay publishers a cut for each advertisement that appears or when someone clicks on an advertisement.

Ad networks

Malware sites advertise through these networks on a “pay-per-click-only” contract because it is a “low-risk high-return” option. But the networks could make life harder for them by, for example, vetting the creatives (advertising text, graphics, scripts and links) offered for an ad campaign before accepting them for display and through the life of the campaign. Similarly, they could make it harder to establish or sustain advertising contracts for “fly-by-night” operations like distributing malware such as implementing the ability to break-off ad contracts if the advertiser engages in deceptive conduct or not offering “very-low-risk” advertising options such as “pay-per-click-only” text ads. One way would be to require all ad contracts to be based on the requirement to pay for a particular time length or minimum number of impressions.

Ad networks can also exchange details about advertisers that engage in deceptive business practices so that the advertisers don’t go “shopping around” different ad networks to hawk their wares at the lowest risk. This is similar to a lot of proper business practices where companies are able to exchange details about known credit risks for example.

This could be part of an online advertising code of conduct to protect the validity and legitimacy of the online display advertisement as part of an advertiser’s campaign mix and as a way for Web publishers to raise some income.

Webmasters

Webmasters can work with the ad network’s control panel to reduce the kind of advertising that gets through to their ad spaces. For example, they could opt to keep the advertising that appears to tightly reflect the content and tone of their Website. The Webmaster can also exercise a tight level of control over any advertising they directly sell for their Website such as offering contracts with a minimum level of risk to the advertiser or vetting the creative material tendered by the advertisers.

As well, they can take out security measures over the Website to stop undesireable activity from occurring with their Website. This could include implementing hardened login procedures such as brute-force lockout or two-factor authentication on the critical admin and editor accounts.

Conclusion

Like most online-security issues like Wi-Fi security, it isn’t just up to end-users to do the “heavy-lifting” to keep their Web experience secure. Other stakeholders like advertising networks need to join in the game to keep a secure Web with respected online advertising and avoid exposure to liability.