Criminals Taking Advantage of Adwords
For many drug addicts, the most efficient way to find treatment is to go to Google and search for addiction treatment facilities. For the treatment providers the best way to get customers is to bid for specific search words, and if they win the auction then their ads will be at the top of the search result page. Unfortunately, there are many criminals cheating this system. By Federal law, insurers must cover substance abuse treatment. Patients can claim thousands of dollars in insurance claims for treatment. Consequently, a lot of treatment facilities compete to win these patients, but also criminals, with shady and dangerous treatments, who try to win the patients using search results. What has happened is that the top search results are usually not the best or most successful/popular treatment, but whoever paid Google the most for the ad slot. More ways to exploit the addicts became apparent, as some ads led to operators who would lie to patients about their treatment, then sell the patients’ information to other treatment centers. To combat this Google decided in September 2017, to stop accepting ads for rehab centers. In a fairly unregulated market, Google had become the center of criminal activity. However, regulating these ads has proved to be quite challenging and expensive.
As we have learned in class, buying ads on Google involves bidding for certain ad spots in the search results. Usually the person/company with the highest bid will win and get the top ad spot. With generalized second price auctions, each customer would announce their value, and whoever had the greatest value would get the top search result ad slot. However, in real life this practice can lead to shady practices such as with the rehab centers. As more criminals took advantage of ads, the prices for ads and search words got so high that some real treatment facilities couldn’t afford to bid for the ad spots. Consequently, when patients look for treatment, they are presented with false advertising first. So in theory, Google’s method of selling ads works in giving the customer, who wants the ad the most, the spot and gives Google payment accordingly. But, when ethics become involved this method becomes harder to follow. There is no consideration of criminal activity or truthfulness behind the ads in the process we discussed in class. In real life Google needs to screen the customers to verify that there is no criminal or illegal activity involved. Perhaps another way to reduce the amount of illegal activity would be to check the relevancy and usefulness of each ad as well. In addition to taking into account each customer’s value for the ad slots, create a ranking system for how pertinent their ad would be too. This discourages criminals from making false claims if they can’t be supported with evidence and may improve people’s satisfaction with their Google search results.
Link to article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-09-26/why-it-took-google-so-long-to-end-shady-rehab-center-ads