Spamming the Legal System
June 06, 2006
Posted by Laura Curtis at June 6, 2006 09:16 AM
The trackback entry for this page is : http://www.inthehat.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1336
I checked my gmail this morning and learned that I'm "a class member in a class-action lawsuit in the Circuit Court of Miller County, Arkansas." In order to not be part of this lawsuit, I have to take action to exclude myself. This really makes me mad. Granted, it's just a letter, but it's my time and my stamp and my aggravation. And it's the principle of it, as well. How can I be included in a civil legal action without my knowledge or consent?
The person who started this lawsuit "allege[s] that Google breached its contract with class members and violated the law by failing to adequately detect and stop “click fraud” or other invalid or improper clicks on online advertisements." If I go along with this, and the plaintiffs prevail, I might get a minuscule credit for future AdWords. The lawyers will get a bundle, and Google will pass the expense onto me and the rest of their customers. In fact, even if Google wins it will almost certainly mean higher rates because they will pass on the expense of defending themselves.
The person originating this may or may not have a case. I have no idea. I don't care. I use Ad Words for several clients, and we've been very happy with the results. It has translated into ringing phones, closed deals, and increased profits. How I, as a satisfied customer, can get dragged into this is beyond me. Shouldn't we have to opt-in for this kind of thing, instead of opting out?
Posted by Laura Curtis at June 6, 2006 09:16 AM
The trackback entry for this page is : http://www.inthehat.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1336
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Comments
| # June 6th, 2006 1:45 PM james |
| class actions exist to provide relief where none would otherwise be feasible. a phone company might overcharge 500,000 customers by 20 cents each. it's not worth anyone's time or money to sue over 20 cents, so before class actions, companies had carte blanche to rip consumers off, a little bit at a time. class actions have made it economically feasible to sue, which has resulted in far fewer egregious acts on the part of large companies.
you're part of the class by default because you were wronged. it would be economically unfeasible to expect every wronged consumer to opt-in. also, you dont have to personally authorize a every claim brought on your behalf. i think it's a good rule. ive seen the consumer-oriented results of class actions from the company side. i once worked as a programmer in the billing department of a large phone company. a phone company's billing system is anything but bug-free, believe me. at any given time, we had hundreds and hundreds of open tickets. some were open for years at a time b/c they just werent high priority. when doing anything with large numbers of customers, you operate on hundreds of thousands if not millions of accounts at once - which means that if you make a one penny error, it can be worth millions of dollars. every phone company has problems with their proration and tax logic. the cause of many of these problems can be very hard to track down, and as a result, they aren't by default high priority items. i have spent literally WEEKS digging through code to find out why some customer was getting charged 3 cents too much on a prorated bill item. the answer is often "it happens only on rate plan X, when there is a number change, when he lives in a city that charges a local tax on received calls, when he upgrades his plan, in a month with 31 days." i can tell you that if-not-for class actions, those problems would never, ever get fixed. and customers would get overcharged, in perpetuity. as far as click fraud goes - online advertising is rife with click fraud. some estimates put the prevalence of click fraud at around 40% of all clicks. i advertise on yahoo search marketing for a number of clients, and ive personally tracked down click fraud and explained it to yahoo, which was a huge waste of my time. after a three week yahoo invetigation, their conclusion was that there was no click fraud. (despite the fact that the CTR on my ads went up by 10-fold ovre a period of 3 days, and that my charges on that account went from $50 a day to $500 per day. despite the fact that most of the clicks came from the same IP address ranges, many of which resolved back to computers in romania.) yahoo gave me a "goodwill credit" and attributed the problem to the activation of a particular service that i wasnt even using. i pointed out their error, adn they said "yeah, youre right. but we gave you a credit, so the problem is solved." they're "solving" the massive click fraud problem by pretending that it doesnt exist. their algorithms are proprietary, no one monitors their procedures, etc. they have an easy an huge stream of money pouring in from advertisers, and no incentive to make any changes. in fact, when the click fraudsters make money, yahoo and google make money. i think they need to lose a few class action suits so something can be done about the problem. |
| # June 6th, 2006 1:52 PM james |
| this is sorta related, and very interesting:
i was just reading the other day about how google makes money from you even if you don't click on the ads. i cant find the link now, but it goes like this: 1) you do 50 searches a day, but never click an ad 2) google adwords has a minimum CTR - i think it's 1% - meaning that advertisers must bid enough $ that their ads receive at least a 1% CTR. 3) so when you search google but dont click on any of the 10 ads they show you, you drive the CTR for all of those ads down 4) which means that google raises the price it charges advertisers. voila, you've just made google money, even though you didn't click on anything. the article i was reading calcuated that a 50 search-a-day user generates about $30 per year. |
| # June 6th, 2006 1:54 PM Laura |
| Interesting perspective - you've given me a lot to think about.
How do you track down click fraud? Just by monitoring your logs constantly, or what? |
| # June 6th, 2006 6:20 PM james |
| on that particular occasion, i noted in my daily reports that the CTR went way up, and that the price i was charged went way up. at the same time, the overall conversion rate (CTR to sales, which on that account is fairly constant) went waaaaay down. my average cost per ad and average bid position didnt change.
the increase in traffic was clearly due to fraud. i set out to investigating the log files, both apache logs and logs from a custom link track system that i wrote & use. many of the hits were coming from a block of computers located in romania, not exactly my demographic. others were coming from what i suspect are compromised computers - people download crapware to their computer, and a backdoor is installed that lets these thieves tell their computer to register a hit to a certain website. these hits are hard to distinguish on my end - obviously yahoo could do it by checking THEIR logs, but they werent interested. but i knew that a good 80% of my traffic that day was fraudulent, which let me do some statistical analyses. for instance, take the browser string. i had a seemingly random distribution of browser strings on the day in question. the thing is, browser strings arent random - comparing the browser strings & prevalence from previous days, it was clear that this wasn't a natural distribution - it was someone trying to make it look natural. you may not know this, but random events aren't randomly distributed. see, eg, benford's law. an excerpt: Dr. Theodore P. Hill asks his mathematics students at the Georgia Institute of Technology to go home and either flip a coin 200 times and record the results, or merely pretend to flip a coin and fake 200 results. The following day he runs his eye over the homework data, and to the students' amazement, he easily fingers nearly all those who faked their tosses. anyway, i tried explaining all of this to yahoo, but they weren't interested. there is other fraud going on on my accounts. for instance, i have a few ip addresses that "happen" to click my ads every other day for like 6 months straight now. the ip belongs to one pc, not to a gateway for a large organization. when i told yahoo about it, they say only "our fraud department has a very complicated series of algorithms that filter out fraud, blah blah..." sorry marketing lady, your department isnt doing a very good job. they did let me talk to a programmer from that department - long story short, since he can't give out a lot of information , the conversation got really beyond ridiculous. khafkaesque, even. ive learned to just chalk a certain level of fraud up to "cost of doing business." unfortunately, as long as everyone does that, yahoo and google have little incentive to fix the problem. |
| # June 6th, 2006 6:27 PM james |
| it's actually an interesting dynamic if you think about it. everyone except the advertiser benefits from the fraud - the ad network, the criminal, and the publisher. and while the advertiser may not benefit, he's probably ambivalent about the fraud in the first place - assuming that all advertisers are defrauded equally, the cost is just passed on to the consumer as it's written off as the cost of doing business.
because of this, google has no real incentive to clean up its act. if other ad publishers concentrate their efforts on fraud prevention, it may attract advertisers. but it wont attract publishers -- publishers will opt for the more rife-with-fraud systems since they make more $. no publishers = no ad "network." |
| # June 8th, 2006 5:29 PM mbrlr |
| Class actions are, generally, very good things. Miller County? I'll be...ever been to Texarkana? |
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