Chrome Web Store slammed again after 295 ad-injecting, spammy extensions downloaded 80 million times Google's Chrome Web Store is once again under fire for poor policing of harmful extensions. In a blog post this week, ad-blocking biz AdGuard took Google to task for allowing almost 300 policy-violating extensions to be downloaded by over 80 million users – some of whom are likely faked by spammers – without doing anything …
Isn't slinging ads what Google is all about.
Oh wait...
These aren't approved google ads (i.e. ones for which they have received loads of Mulah) but scummy impostors.
Build that wall higher google... a lot higher.
TBH, anyone who uses anything that originates anywhere in Googleland is either bonkers or simply does not care that their every action is recorded, analised and stored for future reference but the company that is obviously starting to believe that it really is an evil 'Big Brother'.
Hey, how about this, Google: perhaps if you stopped tracking us and forcing ads upon us (often for your own products) at every given opportunity, then maybe fewer people would use ad blockers?
Or - here's a radical idea - only serving ads that are plain text/a static image, that are of a limited number of pixels in size, and positioned on screen in such a way as to not be obtrusive and interrupt the flow of someone using the page??? Come on, I know you've got the page analysis tech to manage it!
... yeah right, who am I kidding. Personally, I think that these "initiatives" of Google are all a smokescreen - they've got their snouts too deep in the trough to really care about this.
Employ more people. Rely less on automation.
It's a bit radical for them, I know, but their businesses should only scale if their staff scale alongside them.
- Too many web store submissions to check? Employ more people.
- Too many YouTube videos to check? Employ more people.
- Too many app store submissions to check? Employ more people.
- Too many potentially dodgy ads to check? Employ more people.
I think you see where I'm going with this. If you can't scale, then don't scale. Otherwise accept the costs of your business.
Loads of 'me too' extensions, a few extensions with reviews indicating they were malware and many more that just looked... suspicious.
I'm sure there're some lovely extensions on there but it came across as a hive of scum and villainy.
I guess the root cause is a combination of under-resourced and don't give a shit. Really damages the brand.
Might damage the brand, but it fills the pockets. People cost money, whereas automation that doesn't work is incredibly cheap. And it scales too! As long as people continue to use Chrome, Google has no incentive to spend money to fix the problem. If Chrome's market share isn't impacted, they're not going to change.
"I won't get too technical, it has been all already done last year. What I was absolutely appalled and disappointed by is that these extensions use exactly the same code as the bunch I exposed in 2019. It's a pity that Google, with all their love for automatization, can't automatically weed out such browser extensions."
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