I Used Google Ads for Social Engineering | Hacker News Reader

I Used Google Ads for Social Engineering

nytimes.com

80 pointstysone44 comments

The article is not as interesting as I had guessed from the title, because:

1. It's not about the infosec meaning of social engineering, i.e. the author wasn't trying to get login credenials or system access.

2. It's loosely related to the other meaning of social engineering (causing deliberate societal change), but the author's attempted influence was limited to individuals (getting them to call a hotline).

A better title might be 'how I got 28% conversion for an ad landing page whose CTA was a phone call'.

Ads where you target a small number of people are of course cheap, making pranks like [1] possible for next to no cost. The interesting thing is can you cheaply run campaigns on influential people such a CEOs and politicians. I think you probably could!

[1] https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking...

A couple of meta questions for the HN community:

1. What percent of HN readers have a NYT subscription?

2. There are far more comments here than the source -- is that appropriate? Should the comments ride along w/ the article (for future reference and the fact that they paid for the orginal story/reporting)

>Those who bear the brunt of that abuse aren’t just the impatient and impulsive. More than 50 percent of people still can’t differentiate between an ad (redirect or not) and an organic result on Google.

Some reasarch [0] suggests the figure is much higher and around 60% (from 2017).

Over the past 12-13 years, Google has been steadily making changes as to how they display ads to make them more and more invisible to the user. See the graphic [1]. By making them more invisible, there's a greater chance that they'll get clicked on and make Google more money. With each change, Google probably added tens of billions of dollars in revenue.

[0] https://www.smartinsights.com/paid-search-marketing-ppc/paid...

[1] http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2016/07/...

The Redirect Method sounds like it may be one of Jigsaw's projects. Jigsaw recently got some bad press you may find interesting.[0]

Also, there was a similar experiment done in targeted ads on Facebook not too long ago.[1]

[0] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb98pb/google-jigsaw-beca...

[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-the-secret-facebook-war...

> More than 50 percent of people still can’t differentiate between an ad (redirect or not) and an organic result on Google.

Just wow.

Most people can't tell the difference between an email from Apple and an email from someone with a "from: line" of "Apple".

Most people use Google.com to search for Youtube.com.

My mother did the latter, until I showed her how to use bookmarks and changed the start page to chrome://bookmarks/

She's happy and said "Internet is faster now" :o)

Its probably a good idea to treat most first page results on google as ads anyway.

i wonder how many ppl can differentiate between a paid article and a 'real' one

This is deliberate on Google's end. In fact they keep bluring the line between ads and search results with updates more and more.

The blind downvoting on anything critical/objective about Google is really frustrating on HN.

They're doing this more and more in the Gmail Android app as well. First there were no ads. Then they added ads to the top of the mail list. Now they're interspersing ads between emails. I finally switched to K-9 because of how intrusive it became.

I've never seen ads in Gmail on Android. Is there a setting to disable Gmail ads?

At least on iOS, they only show up if you have the Promotions category enabled. I don't know if this also true on Android or a desktop browser (I use uBlock).

I am disappointed that the author ended on a "this is bad" message for something with such clear potential for good.

Instead of tearing down, why did the author not apply the very thing he learned and use his article's influence and the power of suggestion to influence more people to use this tool positively?

Because the NYT has finally realized that the tech industry in general and Google in particular are direct competitors and existential threats to their business. This is also the explanation for every other hit piece the mainstream media writes about the tech industry.

I know it's comforting to think that journalists draw attention to issues with tech because we're tOtALlY dEStRoYIng ThEiR bUsSiNeSs MoDeL.

But does this trope really need to be pulled out in discussing every single newspiece about tech that isn't flattering?

It doesn't add anything to the conversation that hasn't been said thousands of times, and it fans the flames of anti-journalist sentiment.

It will have to be pulled out for as long as journalists keep writing these biased hit pieces to push their political agenda.

Critiquing tech industry for all the wrong they do is fine. But what NYT does is target two companies and constantly writes articles that find the most negative interpretation to the point where they sometimes even invent things.

Being biased and running a smear campaign against their competitor is what fans anti-journalist sentiment, not people bringing up the bias.

> But does this trope really need to be pulled out in discussing every single newspiece about tech that isn't flattering?

When it comes to dishonest hit pieces like this one, it is the only constructive comment to make. If journalists want to be respected, they should produce respectable work. TFA ain't it.

This is an opinion piece by an SEO consultant.

Publish, then.

What's wrong with "fanning the flames of anti-journalist sentiment" exactly? If journalists aren't meeting the basic requirements society has of them, shouldn't there correctly be such sentiment? How else would journalism be motivated to self-reform?

I read it more as a "here's the keys to the kingdom" and referenced the redirectMethod which even has a step-by-step guide to replicate it. The author is from a search engine marketing consulting firm so it would seem to be almost against his self-interest to lay bare these tactics.

The author's point is that although the author only used it for morally unambiguously good deeds, there are always malicious actors and those who believe that their side of argument is "good" (e.g. extreme left and right political ideologies).

The author believes that there should indeed be some manual review for sensitive issues like these. What if an ad buyer bought ads for AR15s or for bulk order sleeping pills? You can argue that those buyers should be caught and tried, but the harm would be already done. The author would like more oversight from Google and those alike before malicious state actors (gasp!) and/or sick individuals use this unchecked power for bad.

> What if an ad buyer bought ads for AR15s

Yeah, what if? It's a perfectly legal product in my country and people do buy and sell them online (via FFL transfers rather than directly), and the vast majority of people who own and use those rifles do so safely.

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