Other Google admits profiting from illegal Olympic ticket ads

Don't feed the troll....

 

Still no proof of the thorough investigation being wrong then, even from those two north of the border!

Apologies accepted boys

 

I agree with Snips. He seems like a pretty cool guy and doesn't afraid of anything.

 

I lol'd.

His last reply does lean towards the 'troll' theory, I don't think he was ever in here with the intention of having a reasonable discussion.

 

Lol rep for that!

 

Still, no reason for M7ck to call him an idiot. Flaming is bad, mmmmokay?

 

Yeah my bad, sometimes I bite to easily.

 

Thanks Boys

 

To be fair, your side of the discourse in this thread is to state the same arguments over and over again whilst dismissing everyone else's arguments by citing a very, very vaguely related case. As Nexxo has stated, the difference between the Canadian drugs case and the the Olympic tickets one is that Google could have reasonably known that the drug adverts were illegal. The Olympic tickets one is far harder to detect, owing to the fact that the goods advertised are not illegal, reselling tickets is also not illegal (provided you're an official tickets reseller) and advertising it is certainly not illegal.

Speaking from a purely technical standpoint, what you're suggesting is a system, good enough at natural language processing to be able to decipher what an advert is advertising. Then, it has to use some algorithm to determine if a advert is legitimate; as to what metric you can calculate and base that decision from I'm not sure. I've had experience with natural language processing and it's an incredibly complex and often arcane subject. English especially is a very very hard language to teach a computer to read. If you feel you can solve this problem, in a way that doesn't create million of false positives that need to be checked, go ahead. You may even win a Turing award. In all honestly though, I don't think there's a truly feasable solution.

So all that's left to do is continue to use the system of people flagging advertisements to Google should their legitimacy be in question. If the advertisement is found to be a scam, then Google will remove it; no more can be expected. That is exactly what has happened in this case. Asking Google to do more just isn't feasable. If they had done less, I would agree they need to be fined. But in this case, I'd say Google has conducted themselves professionally and without fault.

 

Apologies if it's already been mentioned earlier in the thread, or in one of the linked articles, but surely Google must remove dozens or even hundreds of ads each week as a result of similar reports from users. The only difference being that 99.99% of the time the press don't get a whiff of the details.

As TheKrumpet mentions above, there is currently no other model for Google to use. There is no feasible way for Google to "give back" the monies paid to it after the offending ads have been pulled.

 

Actually it is far easier than you think due to the very small number of ATR's. The only official seller is direct in the UK to london2012. Package and coroporate are also through one place. Ticketmaster also. Anyone else can't and even if they purchased tickets themselves from the official source, it's illiegal to resell in the UK.

 

There's your issue. Google advertises far more than just UK businesses. And anyway, they could write a script that checks any ads for the Olympic games, but what about people who are advertising products in conjunction with it. Say, for example, Travel? Accommodation? Other events happening at the same time? Local bars, restaurants, all the businesses who are advertising themselves as something to do/see between events? I bet you a fair few of those will raise false positives. Not to mention; what's in it for Google to put people onto working this out?

Also, it's only easier than I think in this context. Try applying that logic to every other event/product/service that Google advertises. Then, it becomes exactly as hard as I stated.