Benjamin Edelman
January 21, 2010
Upromise Savings — At What Cost?
Upromise touts opportunities for college savings. When members shop at participating online merchants, dine at participating restaurants, or purchase selected products at retail stores, Upromise collects commissions which fund college savings accounts.
Unfortunately, the Upromise Toolbar also tracks users’ behavior in excruciating detail. In my testing, when a user checked an innocuously-labeled box promising “Personalized Offers,” the Upromise Toolbar tracked and transmitted my every page-view, every search, and every click, along with many entries into web forms. Remarkably, these transmissions included full credit card numbers — grabbed out of merchants’ HTTPS (SSL) secure communications, yet transmitted by Upromise in plain text, readable by anyone using a network monitor or other recording system.
Article here
http://certifiedbug.com/blog/tag/edelman/
Benjamin Edelman
January 12, 2010
I’ve repeatedly reported improper placements of Google ads. In most of my write-ups, the impropriety occurs in ad placement — Google PPC ads shown in spyware popups, in typosquatting sites or in improperly-installed and/or deceptive toolbars. This article is different: Here, the impropriety includes a fake click — click fraud — charging an advertiser for a PPC click, when in fact the user never actually clicked.
But this is no ordinary click fraud. Here, spyware on a user’s PC monitors the user’s browsing to determine the user’s likely purchase intent. Then the spyware fakes a click on a Google PPC ad promoting the exact merchant the user was already visiting. If the user proceeds to make a purchase — reasonably likely for a user already intentionally requesting the merchant’s site — the merchant will naturally credit Google for the sale. Furthermore, a standard ad optimization strategy will lead the merchant to increase its Google PPC bid for this keyword on the reasonable (albeit mistaken) view that Google is successfully finding new customers. But in fact Google and its partners are merely taking credit for customers the merchant had already reached by other methods.
In this piece, I show the details of the spyware that tracks user browsing and fakes Google PPC ad clicks, and I identify the numerous intermediaries that perpetrate these improper charges. I then criticize Google’s decision to continue placing ads through InfoSpace, the traffic broker that connected Google to this click fraud chain. I consider this practice in light of Google’s advice to advertisers and favored arguments that click fraud problems are small and manageable. Finally, I propose specific actions Google should take to satisfy to prevent these scams and to satisfy Google’s obligations to advertisers.
Article here
http://certifiedbug.com/blog/tag/edelman/
