Skip to main content

Google cracks down on voting-related ads that mislead users to malicious sites

Google is cracking down on ads that mislead people to malicious sites when they looked up voting information. The company on Monday said it has removed several search ads that unlawfully scammed users into paying up to $129 for voter registration, harvested their personal data including credit card credentials, and installed deceptive add-ons on their computers.

The takedown comes after a report published by the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), a non-profit watchdog, that discovered nearly a third of the more than 600 voting-related search ads on Google were manipulative. The ads — that sit above at the top of the search results — appeared when people looked up common voting terms such as “register to vote,” “vote by mail,” and “where is my polling place.”

Recommended Videos

A Google spokesperson told Reuters that the company is investigating how these ads slipped through its approval process, which involves a manual review, in the first place.

“We have strict policies in place to protect users from false information about voting procedures, and when we find ads that violate our policies and present harm to users, we remove them and block advertisers from running similar ads in the future,” Google said in a statement sent to Digital Trends.

Most of the ads the TTP found were masquerading as official information hubs. One such ad, hosted by a company called PrivacyWall, charged users $129 for “same-day processing” to register to vote. Another called RegisterMyVote tried to collect a trove of personal data for marketing purposes.

Since ads on Google now employ the same typeface and color scheme as organic search results, it’s also a lot harder for users to tell them apart. “Such ads could have a suppressive effect on voters. Users searching for guidance about elections who instead find themselves on manipulative or confusing sites may eventually give up on finding the information they need,” wrote the non-profit organization in a blog post.

Earlier this year in February, Google pledged to offer voters “quality, authoritative information” on its search engine among several other initiatives for the 2020 presidential elections. It also no longer allows political organizations to micro-target citizens based on their online activities when they buy ad space on Google and YouTube.

Shubham Agarwal
Shubham Agarwal is a freelance technology journalist from Ahmedabad, India. His work has previously appeared in Firstpost…
Google’s Ask Photo feature is available for users that joined a waitlist
Google's Ask Photos debut.

Google has been on a roll lately with updates that make its platform dramatically more user-friendly than before, and one of the most impressive of these is the new Ask Photos feature in Google Photos. The feature has been hinted at for the better part of a year, but the official announcement came at the beginning of September, when interested fans could sign up for a waitlist. According to the folks at 9to5Google, those early adopters might now have the feature available to them.

Ask Photos is a Gemini-powered tool that uses text prompts to search your photo library. If you have thousands of photos saved to the cloud, this feature makes it possible to find a specific image without scrolling for hours.

Read more
Google expands its AI search function, incorporates ads into Overviews on mobile
A woman paints while talking on her Google Pixel 7 Pro.

Google announced on Thursday that it is "taking another big leap forward" with an expansive round of AI-empowered updates for Google Search and AI Overview.
Earlier in the year, Google incorporated generative AI technology into its existing Lens app, which allows users to identify objects within a photograph and search the web for more information on them, so that the app will return an AI Overview based on what it sees rather than a list of potentially relevant websites. At the I/O conference in May, Google promised to expand that capability to video clips.
With Thursday's update, "you can use Lens to search by taking a video, and asking questions about the moving objects that you see," Google's announcement reads. The company suggests that the app could be used to, for example, provide personalized information about specific fish at an aquarium simply by taking a video and asking your question.
Whether this works on more complex subjects like analyzing your favorite NFL team's previous play or fast-moving objects like identifying makes and models of cars in traffic, remains to be seen. If you want to try the feature for yourself, it's available globally (though only in English) through the iOS and Android Google App. Navigate to the Search Lab and enroll in the “AI Overviews and more” experiment to get access.

You won't necessarily have to type out your question either. Lens now supports voice questions, which allows you to simply speak your query as you take a picture (or capture a video clip) rather than fumbling across your touchscreen in a dimly lit room. 
Your Lens-based shopping experience is also being updated. In addition to the links to visually similar products from retailers that Lens already provides, it will begin displaying "dramatically more helpful results," per the announcement. Those include reviews of the specific product you're looking at, price comparisons from across the web, and information on where to buy the item. 

Read more
Google is cracking down on internet security in this big way
Connection is not private warning from Google.

Google is making some serious changes to digital certificate security on the web, the company announced on its Security blog. The big news is that Google will no longer trust certificates from two large security firms -- Entrust or AffirmTrust -- due to repeated security lapses.

According to Google, the companies, which are Certificate Authorities (CA), have demonstrated patterns of unmet improvement commitments, compliance failures, and no measurable progress in how fast the company responds to publicly disclosed incident reports.

Read more