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Over 40% of New Mechanical Turk Jobs Involve Spam
An anonymous reader writes "An NYU study reveals that over 40% of the jobs posted by new employers on MTurk are some sort of spam request, such as fake account creation, fraudulent ad clicks, or fake comments, tweets, likes and votes. The study also shows that the bad jobs could be automatically filtered with 95% accuracy, but Amazon is not interested."
So when 40% of their MT service usage is contrary to the ToS, everything's fine and dandy.
But when Wikileaks is in full compliance with the ToS of their EC2 service, they get the boot?
That data is from two months back, before Google Places appeared in web search. Now, it's worse. There's a whole mini-industry in the "black hat" search engine "optimization" community creating phony Google Places entries. Here's an ad on Mechanical Turk today:
Google Places spamming hasn't been fully automated yet, so we get to watch spammers outsource their manual spamming. Spamming Google Places is incredibly easy, much easier than creating the link farms required to spam Google's old web search. See the instructions in "Dominating Google Maps- The Most Effective Spam Ever And What You Can Learn From It".
Google Places has been 0wned.
I find it interesting that the people placing the HITs have to decide whether the work done is good quality and then decide to pay or not. So that means for each tiny job you farm out, you have to do your own tiny bit of make work to decide whether to pay or not. Can you farm this out on the turk too? If not, maybe there's a market for a service that let's you do so...
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
From my time exploring mturk I would have guessed it to be much higher than that, non-spam related jobs were definitely the minority of what I saw.
The creepiest (and highest paying) job I saw though involved watching surveillance footage from airports, making sure the automated face tracker stayed on target...
The surprise is that anyone noticed all these HIT requests.
Who, other than the utterly unemployable, has time to take on meaningless tasks dished out by machine for pennies. You can find more money laying on the ground in a parking lot.
A casual perusal didn't find one task I would do for fun or profit.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I'm also surprised at how low the wages are at this Turk thing. ... I thought spammers had to at least sweat through that manual task by themselves.
It's like $0.25 per human-generated spam. Automation seems to be coming. I'm seeing mentions on black hat SEO forums that an automated tool for doing this in bulk will be released early next month.
Marketing fake numerical addresses in between legit ones ensures that Google Pagerank rates your "unique" business as #1...
Sometimes. That technique is mostly used to give real businesses extra bogus locations. Check out "New York City locksmith", for example. Other heavily spammed terms are "carpet cleaning" and "divorce lawyer".
This week's new technique is described at "How To Spam Google Maps For Top Google Place Listings". This is like SQL injection for mailing addresses. The trick depends on Google's parsing of mailing addresses from the top, while USPS standards say they should be parsed from the bottom line upward. So a mailing address with two street addresses is parsed differently by the USPS and Google, allowing the spammer to redirect Google's confirmation postcard to some mail drop.
Google seems to be out to lunch in this area. The same exploits have been working for months. Yet Google doesn't list any such issues under "Known Issues. Over on Matt Cutts' blog, where you'd expect to see some discussion of this, he reports that he's writing a novel.
It's even worse at Bing. Bing emulated Google's October 27th merger of Places into web search within a few days. But they weren't ready. Look up "New York City locksmith" in Bing, and the five "Places" entries are all the same business.