BBC News - Google admits profiting from illegal Olympic ticket ads - 6 views
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Jorge F1 on 11 Jan 12This article has made clear that the AdWords advertising system is flawed, it is unacceptable for a large company like Google to lead users to believe that a website can be trusted using the 'sponsored links' and continues to make profit. This goes against the 6th point in Google's philosophy "You can make money without doing evil" although they are not doing it consciously. From the article I understood that the system is run using an automated filter to identify websites which break Google's policy and a manual assessment also takes place by a human. Instead of using just one human, a group of humans can assess the adverts to ensure nothing is missed. Furthermore, an update of Google's databases should regularly take place in order to catch illegal websites quicker.
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Morten Nielsen on 11 Jan 12Google's corrupt sponsored links affects nearly every digital citizen, as Google is by far the most popular and used search engine. There is alternatives to Google, but nevertheless Google is the most popular search engine(we're talking 70+% http://www.seoconsultants.com/search-engines/ ) I agree with Jorge's main ideas above. However, I do not think that increasing the number of people checking would make any large difference. It is their filters which needs an update - something I'm sure they're already doing. It does raise some reliability concerns, being the most popular search engine, you'd expect them not to endorse(even unknowingly) corrupt links.
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El Mexicano Pastiche on 12 Jan 12The social and ethical issues related to this news story are reliability, privacy and anonimity to an extent. Privacy as the information from the buyers credit card is given to what seems to be an unknown person or company. The multiple stakeholders seen would be the buyer, Google and the advertiser. Although it is via Google that the advertiser gets sell his product, it is important to understand that there are most likely thousands of advertisements added daily to the Google search engine and, referring back to Jorge's point, it would be very likely that humans would fail to see such mistakes as well after repeatedly going through hundreds of adds everyday. The trust and reliance that people have on Google can be misleading and it is evident that to solve such an issue people must be awared of the several scams that they are exposed to every single day in order to prevent this sort of problems.