Invisible app ads slug smartmobes with 2GB of daily downloads Invisible rogue mobile apps are wasting petabytes of data a day through an advertising hijacking technique researchers say could inflict US$1 billion in damages this year. Some 5000 malicious Android and iOS apps are hiding the rapidly-reloading ads from users and will continue to operate even if the apps are not in use. That …
What AV's that then?
You surely must realise that 99.9% of mobes and f-slabs are blithely ambling around naked as the day they were imaged. It's like the desktop circa the turn of the Century (or sex around 1967) out there. It'd be beautiful but for all the snakes in the garden ...
Yeah.. they have to pay for impressions. How about the poor guy/gal who has a data limit and suddenly starts getting hit for 2G of data per day? I too am surprised that the AV isn't catching this. And as for AV and a hostfile, many AV's "clean up" your hostfile for you... by deleting re-directs.
I may have little sympathy for the advertisers but lots for the unsuspecting users who are getting hit with data charges by this fraud.
"I may have little sympathy for the advertisers"
Your sentiment is misplaced. Ask yourself, who pays the advertisers?
When you think about it you'll realise that ultimately its the unsuspecting user getting stung, all the time. Advertising is just a business expense for retailers, suppliers, builders, etc who pass the cost on to us.
So also ask yourself how ethical is ad funded software and online services? Before you answer that, consider these points:
* The likes of Google are perfectly happy for this type of fraud to take place, they cream off the top every time. In fact, Google have been particularly effective at inventing new services (maps, search, mail, etc) specifically for creating new avenues for adverts. Businesses then have to take up advertising on those services for fear of falling in the public conciousness and losing market share. And every man, woman and child has to pay for that no matter what phone or computer they buy.
* The whole of the UK advertising industry is worth £14billion per year, about £600 for every wage earner, and about half of that is online digital. That's about £300 per year paid to companies like Google by every wage earner in the country. And every time a company like Google invent a new service, that figure goes up.
I think the answer is that it's not very ethical at all. There's already way too much advertising, we can hardly be more advertised at, yet we all pay extra for it without the option.
Worse, Google don't really pay any tax anywhere either.
So Who Owns Google?
That's also a worthwhile question. Google, Facebook, etc. have shareholders, and ultimately shareholders tend to be a small number of individuals and financial institutions who are themselves ultimately owned by pension schemes. That's right, some of that £300 per year in the UK is going into funding foreign pensioners, without it being taxed to help support the UK population first. Terrific.
about £300 per year paid to companies like Google by every wage earner in the country
I do hope that UK companies also have customers outside Blighty and the Falklands?
Worse, Google don't really pay any tax anywhere either.
Seriously, citation needed.
That's right, some of that £300 per year in the UK is going into funding foreign pensioners, without it being taxed to help support the UK population first.
How much is "some" .. 0.5%? Any numbers?
Also note that this money supports people who might be on the dole without advertising revenue, so you ACTUALLY PAY LESS TAXES FOR DOLE SUPPORT! Isn't that great?
I do hope that UK companies also have customers outside Blighty and the Falklands?
Have you seen the balance of trade recently?
Seriously, citation needed.
Oh good grief, have you spent the last decade asleep?
"Also note that this money supports people who might be on the dole without advertising revenue, so you ACTUALLY PAY LESS TAXES FOR DOLE SUPPORT! Isn't that great?"
Are you seriously suggesting that everyone involved in forcing unwanted information into peoples' eyes in the many imaginative ways they do so is otherwise totally incapable of earning a living in any other way? Sounds to me like you're insulting them. And whilst I may not be paying tax for their dole money, everything I buy to house my family, feed them and keep them clothed costs more because of the advertising commissioned to try and persuade me to buy more of it.
You could enrol at your local continuing education establishment for a basic business economics course, or consider the following argument:
Why do businesses spend money on advertising? It's not because they like to reduce their profits by throwing money away, it's because advertising, like it or not, has been demonstrated to increase sales volumes and hence revenues. Greater sales volumes allow fixed costs to be spread over more units and hence tend to reduce prices, not increase them.
So, no, however much you may personally dislike adverts, you're not paying for them through increased prices, and nor am I.
"it's because advertising, like it or not, has been demonstrated to increase sales volumes and hence revenues. "
Only if it's the right advertising, in the right media
Bearing in mind a local newspaper campaign I ran for a company which netted 0% of the cost ($2500) of the advertising (20 years ago) - that's right, not one single sale attributable to the adverts.
meantime a single advert in the back pages of another newspaper ($60) picked up 100 times more business than the cost, repeatably.
You should have seen the size of the pout on the local newspaper ad rep when I informed her of the differences and exactly _why_ my advertising dollar was going to the rival from another city. (She had the cheek to offer a new campaign with double the number of placements with a 10% discount on the higher chargable rate and then got upset when I laughed at her)
Similar things happened with radio advertising.
Placement is everything and most Internet adverts are worse than useless. (They don't get sales _and_ they irritate potential+existing customers)
Of course, not all advertising is equally effective* (or effective at all). But net, net it must more than pay for itself or people wouldn't do it. If you doubt this, feel free to start your own business and promote it by word of mouth only. Your product should be cheaper than your competitors, and you'll make billions. Or maybe not.
* As Viscount Leverhulme famously observed of Unilever: “I know that half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. My only problem is that I don’t know which half.”
@moiety Yes advertising costs are tax deductible, like every other legitimate business expense, such as offices, plant or wages. It isn't some weird tax dodge.
Why do businesses spend money on advertising? It's not because they like to reduce their profits by throwing money away, it's because advertising, like it or not, has been demonstrated to increase sales volumes and hence revenues.
In the online world, not so much. Most adverts irritate the shit out of the end user. That's not conducive to business activity.
I'm irritated by online adverts, too (though I suspect we're not the typical target audience). The truth is that online advertising is a new, thoroughly immature industry. Compared to the (similarly irritating ) TV adverts that have been running for almost 75 years, where the nice people at AC Nielsen will tell you fairly precisely how many people watched your advert - they're trying (and investing huge amounts of time and money) to do the same thing for Internet ads, but it's (obviously) much more difficult.
But if you're correct and online ads put off more people than they encourage to buy a product, they will eventually stop.
But if you're correct and online ads put off more people than they encourage to buy a product, they will eventually stop.
Couple of points:
1. There will always be people that cannot fathom AdBlock et al and will thus be forced to view ads. Most advertisers will work on the basis that a percentage of viewers will follow ads. Trouble is there is a lot of subterfuge going on with the online ads market - ads that inflate to cover your phone screen as you were about to follow a link thus generating a false statistic.
2. Google has a nice little trick whereby, when searching, a shitload of paid results come up first in the list. If the company or service you were after appears in that section then why scroll down to the real results for the link? Google would proclaim the advertising worked whereas I would state that in the absence of the paid results I'd still have gone with the same provider as they were high in the actual search results. With their tailored search results nearly every time I search these days (unless anonymising) the service/store I'm after is in both the paid and the real results. Google is just there to optimise the payoff from search and advertising however this can be achieved. PHBs will always play ball for fear of missing out.
Personally I don't care about typical page-filler ads as I block them all.
I'm sure you're right that some (I'd say many) people can't work AdBlock. There'll be others (like me) who could use it, but don't as they consider it to be freeloading (ask some of the nice people at ElReg how long they'd stay open if every reader used ad blockers).
But if you're smart enough to work out the issues with Internet ads and the 'gaming' that goes on by the ad suppliers, I'm pretty sure the people in the marketing department at $Megacorp can too.
Why do businesses spend money on advertising? It's not because they like to reduce their profits by throwing money away, it's because advertising, like it or not, has been demonstrated to increase sales volumes and hence revenues. Greater sales volumes allow fixed costs to be spread over more units and hence tend to reduce prices, not increase them.
What rot. Businesses are spending more on advertising now than they ever did pre-google simply because there are now so many digital advertising places to advertise. Businesses primarily fear not being seen, so they advertise. The advertising market is roughly half digital, half not. Digital effectively doubled the advertising market. But we're not buying twice the quantity of washing powder, crisps, cars, etc.
It's not for nothing that it's called the Google Tax.
It's true that the Internet has captured half of all advertising revenues. That's not the same thing as those total revenues doubling - that really is 'rot' - there's a reason print media are struggling.
But, as I pointed out, if you really believe in your own position, you should start a business with no advertising (or, at least, no Internet advertising). Since everyone else is throwing their money away, you'll clean up. See you at the next Bilderberg meeting!
That's right, some of that £300 per year in the UK is going into funding foreign pensioners,
Nice try, until that UKIP propaganda rant at the end.
You might care to consider that there are far more Google consumers outside the UK than inside, and many of those pension funds manage pensions for UK retirees. Of course "some of that €300 per year in Germany is going into funding UK pensioners" wouldn't have sounded anywhere near as bad.
Isn't a lot of advertising deductible? So the money is going into advertising instead of taxes.
No. Advertising is tax-deductable in exactly the same way as any other cost of sale - materials, manufacturing costs, distribution costs, staff wages and so on. Advertising is a more visible irritant than any of these, but that doesn't alter the fact that it's an essential element.
Like most people, I find it annoying that the roads are full of heavy articulated trucks. But it would be idiotic for me to suggest that companies should distribute everything by canal, or to complain that the money spent on trucking is money diverted from taxes. To suggest that the abolition of advertising would increase tax revenues is equally incorrect.
Read Tim Worstall's recent article debunking the Grauniad's claim that capital allowances are a subsidy for companies for a similar case.
As use of this technique does not a a virus make, it might better be labeled as a PUP. Still, you would think that people in the anti-malware market would at least think to warn their customers about high network data usage, especially if the app was not active. This would seem like a simple catch for heuristic analysis, but my guess is that the folks in the anti-malware business are still writing for desktops and have yet to get their heads around the implications of mobile devices.
A couple of years ago I was on a 2Gig MONTHLY limit on the desktop. Rarely exceeded it, except when downloading a new .iso ..
Even regularly played Wolfenstein ET.... service was upgraded to 'unlimited'.
Last year used the router to monitor data usage and it was running at 2 Gig a day! (and at this point the game playing had stopped.)
It's not just advertising, but it seems that websites are too keen to throw more and more images and video at us per page.. (and a certain social media site has a lot to answer for, too)
... although probably not charitably. I do pity the poor sods who are having their bandwidth unwittingly rogered senseless, particularly if they're roaming and uncapped their limit.
Even by the usual standards of cockups, the ad industry seem insistent on adding ever more ways to get it wrong and add to the mountain of reasons to block ads. You could block these via a hostfile on your own network, but I can't think of a way to do it on a mobile network.
VPN into a box you control, where you can provide any DNS/DHCP/proxying goodness required for an ongoing connection. Bit more work, but no rooting required (on Android, at any rate; IIRC IOS has an unprivileged VPN API too, but not really my area).
I do this already just for privacy on the data network, and so my client IP address doesn't keep changing every few minutes breaking sessions with many sites. Never thought of employing it for ad-blocking as well, but should work. Only issue I can see is if some of the adserver IPs are hardcoded in Android, which would not surprise me :(
The fact that it is in a business's interest to advertise does not mean that it is in the general interest.
This is a textbook fallacy. As individuals, we cannot change the market prices we face for goods and services in general, so we must take them as given in looking at the opportunity cost of different choices. Likewise we can't change the level of advertising we compete with so must take that as a given. For the country or the world or even a particular industry this kind of calculation simply does not make sense, except in external trade.
Advertising has some capacity to communicate new products and services to potential customers but this would required a small fraction of the advertising in the modern world. The primary function of modern advertising is out-branding your competitors, largely by repetition. Familiarity is a massive driver of human choices. A little game theory shows that advertising increases to the level where it becomes a waste of money for the average individual actor, not to the level where it optimises general welfare. This is a classic arms race situation.
Obviously without advertising, we would have to find alternate ways of paying for some great advertising industry pissups, the lifestyles of elite sportpersons, and for having stupid numbers of apps on our phones, but the background level of advertising could be lowered - or raised - with limited impact on individuals or businesses. Outside the advertising industry itself, of course, which would love to see the commissions from having every available physical and virtual surface covered with ads.
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