By Tom Galvin
Medium.com
Google has a checkered history when it comes to associating with and profiting from illicit operators — to put it charitably. That’s why its recent response to a Senate inquiry about the company’s support of criminals peddling pirated content is so troubling. The responses demonstrate that the tech giant still doesn’t fully know what it means to be a responsible company.
Late last year, U.S. Senators asked Google why it paid for its own advertisements to appear on criminal piracy apps and whether its ad tech facilitated other companies’ ads being placed on these illicit platforms. The company’s response was the equivalent of a shrug, noting “advertisements for Google were just 1.2% of the ads on the reviewed applications.” In effect, Google says that the likely several million dollars it paid criminals isn’t important because it’s just a small percentage of its overall ad budget.
Here’s the problem when a company such as Google doesn’t take criminal activity seriously: it harms Americans. Ransomware, identity theft, and other online financial crimes disrupt businesses and supply chains. And one of the ways they infect devices is by using piracy websites and apps to spread malware.
Senators also noted that Google’s own ad tech systems facilitated 51 percent of all advertisements on piracy apps and asked directly whether the company profited from advertising on pirate websites. Google didn’t provide a direct answer.
The answers are disappointing but not surprising. Google has an awkward relationship with criminal and illicit activities. It forfeited $500 million a decade ago after the Justice Department accused the company of helping overseas pharmacies illegally target U.S. consumers looking to purchase drugs — with prosecutors claiming that co-founder Larry Page knew of and approved the scheme. Around the same time, a Harvard professor estimated that Google’s revenue from illegal activities could exceed $1 billion. In reaction to the pressure, Google in 2014 founded the Trust in Ads group to identify and root out malicious ads. But once the pressure was off, Google allowed the group to die.
Google’s responses to the Senate inquiry are in stark contrast to Amazon, which acknowledged in a letter to lawmakers that it had paid to put its own ads on piracy platforms, said it undertook new efforts to curtail funding for the criminal enterprises, and vowed to “not stop improving until we are 100 percent effective.” Even Facebook (now Meta) acknowledged a piracy problem in its response to Senators and promised to address the problem.
Piracy and malware are growing concerns for both security experts and law enforcement. With the pandemic leading to a shift to an at-home workforce, the security risks from piracy only increases as work computers and piracy devices share the same network. People who visit piracy sites are three times more likely to report malware issues than those who don’t visit these sites. Advertising on piracy websites and apps are a cesspool of risk: advertising and piracy expert White Bullet found that 1 in 4 ads on piracy sites were either fraudulent or contained malware.
That is why Google should not shrug off its support for these criminal enterprises. Maybe when you are as dominant and wealthy as Google, a few million dollars here or there to criminals doesn’t matter. But Americans care. A recent survey found that two-thirds of Americans said that well-known brands should not support pirate websites and apps with their advertising dollars. And what should be more worrisome to Google is that 65 percent of Americans believe that “Google probably knew its systems were placing ads on pirate websites and apps.”
Simply put, Google has to do better. When it comes to criminal activity, Google needs to commit to a zero-tolerance policy.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other digital platforms would do the public a service if they worked together to identify and ban bad actors, much like casinos do globally to spread the word about card cheats and scammers. This type of collaboration would prevent criminals and other bad actors — whether pirates, credit card thieves, counterfeiters, scammers, or drug dealers — from being able to jump from platform to platform to avoid detection and accountability.
If that’s not enough, perhaps Google will realize it’s in its best interest to do better. Only 30 percent of Americans think Google is an ethical company. In addition, the company faces a slew of potentially costly anti-trust actions by the Justice Department and state attorneys general and scrutiny from lawmakers concerned with its impact on society.
Google indeed has shown that its greatest motivation is self-interest. It is time the company realizes that ending its partnerships and collaboration with online criminal syndicates may be just as good for Google as it is for the country.
Tom Galvin is executive director of the Digital Citizens Alliance and is focused on raising awareness about issues such as piracy and malware, the illegal online sale of opioids, steroids, and other prescription drugs, and the blurring of the lines between the Dark Web and mainstream digital platforms.