Comment by collabs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by collabs | Hacker News Reader

My opinion is that someone somewhere is paying for those ads and Google needs to get positive identification of a human being for any ad. Google has a near monopoly so there is no reason Google can't force this requirement arbitrarily. Once you have positive identification, suspend them pending further investigation if they serve any dodgy ad. I will be genuinely surprised if Google makes any money off of these dodgy ads. How? Like how does this money flow? Where does it come from?

There has to be a way to enforce positive identification, right?

Google already does this for Google play developers. I can't use a US credit card to pay for the USD 25 fee for a student on Bangladesh for example because I understand the payment method is one of the signals they use to make sure the student developer is a real person.

Is this something Google won't do on its own without being forced to act?

Potential issues: - There are some well-known ways around developer verification (peopl in some countries _need_ them for one reason or another so - they use non-local cards,etc) - it's very basic verification and people who pay for ads likely arleady do it (payment have to come from somewhere). - Proof of address is also spoofable and there are some situations were people making/providing fakes when they don't mean ill intent towards anybody else (example: Russia, some of ways to make non-Russian-only Visa/MC require making fake proof) but such methods could also be abused for doing actual harm. - ID verification sometimes complicated if a lot of countries are involved. Example: I'm not at all sure at least one person in Google actually knew what Abhazian passport is and how to verify it ?

These are pathetic excuses for a company with 400 billion in revenue. If they can't afford to hire people and develop systems, that means they don't have a viable business model that doesn't rely on scamming. Simple as that. I'm so tired of such excuses used for companies that make insane profits. What, they get to do that because alternatives are too complicated? I'm too stupid to get a phd in [insert field here], so I should be able to make a living running scams? These are the people who are claiming to work on AI and potentially AGI. Utterly ridiculous.

Google as just as scammy as the scammers. For many years they manipulated auctions to capture more market share.

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