Google admits to pocketing profits from ads on seamy sites

[Jack]

Google has admitted to the BBC that it is pocketing profits from ads for illegal products disseminated from its automated advertising system.

According to the BBC report, published Monday, these ads include fake ID cards, fake passports, cannabis, and bogus London 2012 Olympics tickets.

The company told the BBC's 5 live Investigates radio program that it keeps the money it makes from advertising such illegal services before it takes down the ads.

Google "promptly removed" illegal ads after the BBC brought them up, according to Adrian Goldberg, a 5 live Investigates presenter.

Google wasn't quite so prompt when it was the police who did the asking, however.

It is illegal in the U.K. to sell Olympic tickets without the organizers' permission, with a maximum fine for resellers now at £20,000 (US$31,000).

A branch of the police dedicated to stopping crime associated with the 2012 games, the Metropolitan Police, told the BBC it is aware of the illegal reseller. That reseller, LiveOlympicTickets, was, in fact, breaking the law, the police said.

Yet the ads stayed up for more than a week after the Metropolitan Police asked Google to remove them—in fact, the ads were only taken down after the BBC contacted Google.

Read more ...

 

[Prorootect]

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Not to mince words about Google's intentions .. it's easy: money, money, money forever, obviously. So now BBC is the best Google intentions revealer.

'There's [Google's] an automated complaint form, which gets an automated reply, which lets you know you're in a queue, and eventually a human being will get around to scrutinising it and do something about it.'

'Remember that the weight of Google behind an advertisement does not equate to legitimacy.'

'Google obviously profits from people getting snared by unwholesome online actors. Should it be expected to forgo such profits, which it makes off of others' mistakes?'

Thank you Jack for this revealer read!

I use Google's search engine for my malware sites search only.
For everyday's web search, I use Privatelee and DuckDuckGo searches (with WOT implemented).
I have also Bing (for pictures of the day), then I use Blekko and Thumbshots.net.
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