Online advertising continues to be inundated with sketchy products. Our computer screens serve as unwilling hosts to ads for nutritional supplements of dubious nutrition, wacky health tips that will probably do nothing for your health, ads for reverse mortgages, and there's no better way to make even the most up-and-up product look cheap and crooked than to put it in Satan's own personal contribution to the effort, the animated gif. But Google today announced that it will be greatly restricting one particular product from their own ad networks as being conspicuously worse than even those.
On Wednesday, the search engine announced that it would ban ads for payday lenders (and similar services) starting on July 13.
So-called "payday loans" will be defined by Google as loans repayable within 60 days or with APRs equal or greater than 36%. Predatory under almost any circumstances, the online variation can be even more dangerous for consumers than the strip mall version:
A report from Upturn, a technology-focused consulting firm, outlines why the use of ad targeting for this specific product is particularly harmful. The report details how an action as simple as searching the term “need money to pay bills” can start a dangerous cycle, in which information about an individual’s location, bank accounts, income, and financial health can be collected by lead generators and then dispersed through a more opaque process that can result in fraud, targeted high-priced loans, and harassment from multiple high-cost lenders.
It's not clear how much the new policy will help, or how vigilant the company will be in stripping offenders from their ad network after the July 13th deadline. Coupled with similar policies from Facebook, however, it should at least throw a wrench in the lenders’ gears.
Washington regulators, as well as a handful of states, have been trying to limit the activities of payday lenders by capping how much they can charge consumers in an interest rate. But the decisions by tech giants Facebook and Google – the two biggest websites on the planet – might have as much impact as any single regulation in restricting access to payday lenders.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—Enter the Inhofian Polar Bear Expert:
What a coincidence.
Just as the Alaska State Legislature allocates $2 million for a conference promoting climate change deniers' "expert" analysis of why polar bears aren't really endangered, a poster boy for polar bear junk science emerges from the woodwork.
Enter J. Scott Armstrong, who is a marketing professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. His research emphasizes forecasting methods, which he has used as the cornerstone for—you guessed it—claims that the IPCC climate change projections are actually all wrong.
Now he's extended his "forecasts" to say that polar bears are doing just fine. He alluded to his research when Sen. James Inhofe called him as an "expert" to testify before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee regarding the proposed endangered status of the polar bear; now, Armstrong has released an official statement advertising his paper. […]
Armstrong's claims regarding the increasing polar bear population have been debunked again and again (which doesn't stop Inhofe and others from repeating the claims, of course).
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On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin helps sort out WV and the role of race in… the race. Hairspray von Clownstick taps Rudy Gi911iani. Joan McCarter discovers that the GOP budget #FAIL may be bigger than anyone ever imagined. The Zodiac returns to the Senate to help them do nothing.
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