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Tech big wigs including Facebook and Yahoo! have forged a giant blacklist to block fake web traffic contributing to advertising fraud, said Google ad man Vegard Johnsen.
The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) pilot program will nix bot traffic using a blacklist which could cut a significant portion of web traffic; Google's DoubleClick blacklist alone blocked some 8.9 per cent of traffic.
"The newly shared blacklist identifies web robots that are being run in data centres but that avoid detection by the IAB/ABC International Spiders and Bots List," Johnsen said.
"By pooling our collective efforts and working with industry bodies, we can create strong defenses against those looking to take advantage of our ecosystem.
"We look forward to working with the TAG Anti-fraud working group to turn this pilot program into an industry-wide tool."
Johnsen added that some publishers will do anything to inflate clicks including running tools in data centres that generate fake ad impressions.
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Not all fake clicks were malicious; one legitimate unnamed organisation had generated a whopping 65 per cent as detected by DoubleClick of automated data centre clicks by merely probing ads and ad landing pages across the internet.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2015, @07:54AM
I gather from the article that there is already a similar blacklist, from the IAB, no less.
So why are they not contributing to that list, rolling their own instead? How come they are "working with industry bodies" and are at the same time going out of their way to *not* work with the IAB?
What is the reason they're spending extra money to go it alone?
And why, despite having no idea for an answer, is my gut telling me that it's yet another effort to fuck my privacy in the ass for monetary gain? (yeah, right, it mentioned "Facebook" and "Google", that's why)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2015, @12:33PM
Because a happy side effect of this benevolent enterprise is that it will block any web scraping activity from any non-member of this somewhat exclusive group of web behemoths.
It is interesting, in this respect, that on this little initiative's board of directors nobody of Amazon is to be seen -- could there be a connection, perhaps, to last December's report [wsj.com] by the Wall Street Journal about Google Inc. wanting to push deeper into Amazon's shopping territory?
I imagine Jef Bezos is wondering who delivered that giant cake [wsj.com] to his office.
Further, take note of what The Google [googledata.org] writes: "Well-behaved bots announce that they're bots as they surf the web by including a bot identifier in their declared User-Agent strings. The bots filtered by this new blacklist are different. They masquerade as human visitors by using User-Agent strings that are indistinguishable from those of typical web browsers."
In short, the way pretty much of the web scraping industry works -- or any other competition to Google's own price comparison thingy [soylentnews.org].
Bazinga!