Google will require proof of identity from all advertisers

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/business/media/google-advertising.html

by doener • 6 years ago

172 91 6 years ago

nytimes.com

dclusin• 6 years ago

This will probably be about as effective as requiring ID cards has been to combat underage drinking.

xwdv• 6 years ago

So very.

SilasX• 6 years ago

Exactly. It's a big fallacy to think, "this security measure can be circumvented by a sufficiently capable and motivated attacker, therefore it is pointless."

seibelj• 6 years ago

This is like “Know Your Customer” (KYC) rules required by banks and financial companies. So many online providers ask for it, and it’s so stupidly easy to bypass through stolen documents it’s meaningless. I’ve even seen customers setup booths where they pay people in slums for their documents and go through a “live” KYC in-app process to generate more accounts.

Security Theater, just like everything.

vmception• 6 years ago

I’ve even seen customers setup booths where they pay people in slums for their documents

and here I am with my GPU's heating my apartment with Deep Fake scripts to pass Binance Fake-YC after buying FULLZ off of Empire when I could just be paying people in the tents outside of the ground floor apartments.

I always felt like I was getting out of touch after the guy was passing out 'Elitest Tech Scum' collectible pins at Zeitgeist, but I thought it was just ironic until this very moment.

perl4ever2• 6 years ago

What's your argument for why it's security theater in the context of banks?

It would be an obvious self-serving thing to say, for anyone opposed to similar regulation in other industries, but is it true?

Saying a system isn't perfect isn't the same as saying it has little effect overall.

If the banking system wasn't well controlled, why would people complain so bitterly and frequently about the effect of sanctions?

LanceH2• 6 years ago

The government shouldn't lean on a company to throw barriers in the way of speech. I really don't care what people want to pay to say, even if it is the horrible "fake news" which some seem to think is a new invention.

Why does anyone need to know who paid for all advertising?

Dotnaught• 6 years ago

I really don't care

But it's not just about you. Speech, however it gets categorized, affects people and influences society. You can still say what you want (to the extent allowed by ad platform rules and legal limits on commercial speech) but you should also be accountable for what you say.

jliptzin• 6 years ago

Yea I kind of agree. The antidote to fake news should be an educated population, not banning fake news.

blacksmith_tb• 6 years ago

That's an appealing image, but we can see which of the those is easier to legislate... my instinct is the populace will voluntarily educate themselves only if they can feel the negative effects of 'fake news' in their lives in the short term. Given that we haven't seen much of an uptick in educated discourse online, I would hazard a guess that hasn't happened yet.

SamReidHughes2• 6 years ago

We already have an educated population.

kekdki939o• 6 years ago

Money doesn’t just “exist” like trees

It’s a feature of a society

Society can set rules on how it’s used. And it pushes “unspoken ones” constantly.

There are exactly zero laws of physics that dictate the mathematical shape of our finance system. It’s all human negotiated grift to funnel the value of effort at scale into ephemeral objects we fetishize collectively

Like sky wizards

This isn’t sitting in a room talking to your friends about whatever you want

Anyone can still do that

Politically, free speech to me is emitting whatever syntax I want, and not obliging others to any discoverable semantic meaning they find, and having the same returned

Too often free speech = I’m owed being who I want 24/7 in all contexts

That’s a gross over simplification. Such a life is impossible to achieve without society picking up a whole lot of burden

And really to regurgitate your last line: why do you care how private entities choose to do business?

LanceH2• 6 years ago

I was quite clear I'm against the government leaning on corps to do this -- which is what is going on.

tehjoker• 6 years ago

There's only one sure way to eliminate fraud in advertising: stop advertising. Google is attempting to make it more difficult for malefactors to use its systems, but this disregards the fact that advertising is not a socially beneficial activity and all advertising is an attempt to psychologically manipulate the public.

Therefore, a harm reduction justification is insufficient as it presumes there is some benefit worth the harms being introduced. In fact, there is no benefit and Google is only reducing harm slightly.

larrysalibra• 6 years ago

the fact that advertising is not a socially beneficial activity and all advertising is an attempt to psychologically manipulate the public

That's not a fact, that's your opinion. Advertising is a form of communication and like most communication, the person originating the communication often has a goal or desired outcome in mind. That you or me might not like their goals or the message that they communicate doesn't mean that no one finds it valuable, nor does it mean that we should ban all communication.

carapace2• 6 years ago

Advertising is a form of communication and like most communication, the person originating the communication often has a goal or desired outcome in mind.

So what? It's still "an attempt to psychologically manipulate the public". Advertising is adversarial, it's fundamentally bullshit.

Leela : Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"

Fry : Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.

How is that "a socially beneficial activity"?

Nextgrid5• 6 years ago

To be fair, when it comes to being valuable, criminals consider violence like armed robbery and murder valuable because it helps them achieve their goals, and yet we agree that those things are not a benefit to society and created laws to discourage and punish such acts.

number6• 6 years ago

This wasn't the case already? I could have run a controversial ad to ruin someone's name?

cm2187• 6 years ago

Or spread malware through embedded ads

ocdtrekkie4• 6 years ago

Search ads have been the canonical leading way my clients have ever seen malware. I find Google search ads less regulated and less filtered than spam emails.

I'm really glad they're finally doing this, but it still feels way too irresponsibly late considering the amount of damage they've caused.

adam1210• 6 years ago

This is a massive problem in my experience; even if I report the ads spreading malware to Google they don't ever take them down.

ggggtez• 6 years ago

You could have. And that would have been a crime.

But contrary to popular opinion, tech companies are not a branch of the police force. So they have no obligation to help the police prosecute people without a warrant.

slg• 6 years ago

So they have no legal obligation to help the police prosecute people without a warrant.

FTFY. They may not have a legal obligation to help prevent or prosecute crimes, but there is definitely a moral obligation to not knowingly allow your product to become an easy accessory to crime. Lots of tech companies abdicate that moral responsibility.

code_duck2• 6 years ago

If you mean libel, it's only a crime if what you claim is false. In the US, anyway. From what I understand, in some countries in Europe it only has to be an attempt to defame someone, whether it's true or not.

zozbot234• 6 years ago

Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955606

paulpauper• 6 years ago

The names of the companies or people behind ads, as well as their countries of origin, will begin appearing on Google ads this summer, starting with several thousand advertisers a month in the United States before expanding worldwide. The measure, which could take years to implement, is designed as a defense against businesses and individuals who misrepresent themselves in paid online promotions, Google said.

lol so a tiny crypto exchange can req. ID docs but a huge trillion dollar company will take years>

katmannthree• 6 years ago

A tiny crypto exchange is probably in a position where they can easily get existing employees to manually verify the documents without a significant impact on their business.

In addition to needing to verify orders of magnitude more entities, google likely has many layers of both human and technical abstraction to deal with.

Klinky3• 6 years ago

How was this not already a thing? How does Google not already have a billing address on file for all the advertisers they're accepting money from? It seems like this shouldn't have ever been "voluntary information".

elliekelly2• 6 years ago

This isn’t new technology by any stretch of the imagination. Banks have been required to do some version of this since the 70s. I wouldn’t buy this excuse coming from the management and technology clusterfuck that is Wells Fargo and I certainly wouldn’t buy it from Google.

rmrfrmrf• 6 years ago

wow maybe they should start including this problem as part of their technical interviews

vages• 6 years ago

But Google has millions of unpaid workers that could do part of the job: Recaptcha users.

I'm only half joking. If parts of the process can be outsourced in a responsible manner, I can't see why Google wouldn't.

Igelau• 6 years ago

Prediction: It'll be surprisingly difficult for Mom and Pop to provide sufficient proof of identity and surprisingly easy for mega corporations to do so. There will be a way to report suspected abusers that heavily skews in this direction. It'll basically be like IP enforcement on YouTube.

coffeefirst• 6 years ago

Not likely, but the problem requires context that Google isn't going to share.

In the past few years we've seen bad actors basically automate their process. They expect to be banned. They spin up an account, run scams and malware, get blacklisted, rinse and repeat with a new domain, account, and just enough changes to beat the automated filters within an hour later.

What this does is add a ton of friction to that game. It doesn't even have to be perfect to make a huge difference, it just needs to be difficult to rotate at scale.

qwertox• 6 years ago

Good time to buy some Facebook stock then.

mediascreen3• 6 years ago

Every time I sign up for a service using our company card, with our company address and company email I feel like I'm pretty open about who the buyer is.

Wouldn't a some kind of certified bank card be an even better proof of corporate identity than a copy of someones ID?

IDs needs to be verified against articles of incorporation. For larger companies it will definitely be a hassle to get the CFO to submit their proof of identity for a purchase that is normally delegated way down in the organisation.

lonelappde3• 6 years ago

It's covered in the announcement. There's no need for the CFO to get involved.

https://www.blog.google/products/ads/advertiser-identity-ver...

foepys2• 6 years ago

Is it irrational to be angry that Google got their own .google TLD and then decides to put "www" in front of its second level domain?

mediascreen3• 6 years ago

The announcement provides a short overview, there is a help page that describes the process in more detail [0]. It' only for american companies at this time, but I imagine that it won't get less complicated when it's rolled out for 180 countries with different corporate and legal systems...

The document states that you have to show that you are an authorized representative of the company. I am not that familiar with US law, but in many countries that means one of the signatories of the company, usually someone like the CEO or the CFO.

My point is that it makes sense that you are able to show that you have the right to act on the company's behalf in this matter. I just think that since the company trusts you with it's credit card and there already are systems in place to authorize expenditures, it would be logical to tie the proof that you represent the company to the card in this case.

[0] https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/9703665#700

xhkkffbf• 6 years ago

Okay. Let's say I set up another web site and insist upon these documents. Now I can impersonate you.

How long until we see people signing up for Google ads using someone else's passport, W9 and what not?

This won't last very long.

bottle2• 6 years ago

Now I can impersonate you.

Or you could just use Edward Snowden's passport, or any of the other thousands of people's IDs that have been compromised.

https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5441386/ethical-hacking-o...

mediascreen3• 6 years ago

Well, I'm not arguing for this system.

I suggested using corporate credit cards instead since there are already security mechanisms in place to handle those.

But it obviously require some form of trust in the entity you are interacting with.

dzhiurgis• 6 years ago

Why not solve it at government level. My ID already has NFC chip, now it’s just matter of adding software for iOS (and hardware for macbook).

Don’t wanna use ID? No problem - sign additional tokens a bit like ssl certificate chain works.

buboard• 6 years ago

Congratulations, you just created a secondary market

qwerty456127• 6 years ago

I bet this isn't going to help. Scams and misleading ads will persist.

throwaway122378• 6 years ago

Add your name, address, signature, hair/eye color, picture, and dob to Google’s database. When will this stop

foo7483838• 6 years ago

This is Google shifting legal responsibility from itself so it can run political ads without legal actions etc.

guug• 6 years ago

How will google verify this proof of identity?

Google will require proof of identity from all advertisers

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