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Smartphone Apps Fraudulently Collecting Revenue From Invisible Ads
JoeyRox writes: Thousands of mobile applications are downloading ads that are never presented to users but which collected an estimated $850 million in fraudulent revenue from advertisers per year. The downloading of these invisible ads can slow down users' phones and consume up to 2GB of bandwidth per day. Forensiq, an online technology firm fighting fraud for advertisers, found over 5,000 apps displayed unseen ads on both Apple and Android devices. "The sheer amount of activity generated by apps with fake ads was what initially exposed the scam. Forensiq noticed that some apps were calling up ads at such a high frequency that the intended audience couldn't possibly be actual humans."
On the one hand, fraudsters who steal phone users' bandwidth in order to reap revenue from advertisers, are scum.
On the other hand, so many advertisers are scum as well, and the enemy of my enemy might be my friend. I might be willing to lose a bite out of my data cap in order to stick it to advertisers. Oops, did I say that out loud?
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
[quote]The downloading of these invisible ads can slow down users' phones and consume up to 2GB of bandwidth per day.[/quote]
While this is an interesting revelation, I'm not really sure what the fear-mongering is all about. What is Forensiq trying to sell here?
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
I wonder if a 3rd party lib is responsible for any of this, quietly committing the fraud without the app developer's knowledge? Unless those 5,000+ apps are coming from a relatively small number of developers.
The first thing I do after a system update or rooting is changing the host file to block all know ads servers.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
In android you can view the data usage per app. Is there something similar in iPhone? It easily pinpoints which is the app(s) that is use more data than they should.
I'm pretty sure I had one of these offending apps, at one time -- though, in my case it may have been a legitimate error on the part of the developer, rather then malicious: It was an alarm clock app for iOS, which displayed a banner ad when you had it in portrait mode but not when you had it in landscape mode. Funny thing is, I learned in the course of time that it was still downloading those ads regardless of orientation, because there's an odd quirk in the way some (or all?) iOS apps download ads; they retain the ad on the device for some indeterminate period of time. Since I just left the iPad charging and sitting on that alarm clock app whenever I wasn't actively using the iPad, this caused that one app to bloat to ridiculous proportions over time, eventually filling up multiple gigabytes of space -- that is to say, all of the remaining space on the iPad.
(Naturally, I eventually ditched that app and sought out one which was entirely ad-free.)
On Verizon's network, 1 GB costs $10, so 2 GB * 30 days * $10 = $600. That would be a big deal to me if my kids were playing this game with their 4G connection turned on.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
You should only pay out on pay-per-click, and even then, the payout should be largely affected by how long that user stayed after clicking an ad, whether they bought anything, etc.
Under a Lochean earned income theory of value (i.e. you should get paid for what you earn), paying an advertiser based on how successful you are at *retaining* customers sent your way seems wrong in most cases. The advertiser is then earning or not earning money based on how good of a job *you* are doing at retaining customers, rather than based on how good of a job *they* are doing at sending you customers.
There is one relevant component there still which is whether they are sending you the *right* customers, but usually we measure that by demographics and income rather than by the metric of how long they stay on your site, which is much more dependent on whether *you* are doing a good job retaining customers.
On the other hand, if you are determining what the advertiser should be paid based just on the free-market whatever-we-agree to idea, then you can pay them based on anything you both agree to, including the number of elephants who would fit in your living room. Most advertisers don't sell advertising based on how effective they are at getting customers to buy things, though--that's what salespeople do, and our society tends to make a significant distinction between sales and advertising.
Similar to how you don't pay to receive a call on your land line, the laws around cell billing need to be changed so that advertisers must pay for their bandwidth usage rather than the user. If I don't ask for it, I should not have to pay for it (radical concept...).
Wasting cell data is not a bother to your provider, rather it just lines their pockets. More transparency on the real cost of data might show how big their incentives to let this crap go on are.
Keep it up, keep ripping off advertisers, drive the value of advertising on our phones down to zero. Eventually nobody will be making money and we can relive the golden age of computers on our smartphones, an age dominated by passionate hobbyists and shareware authors.
I keep thinking that we are going to see Google collapse in on itself when people realize that every dollar spent on internet ads leads to less than a dollar worth of increased sales. But Google is smart enough to not be dependent upon ad revenue, but acts as "the house" where they play odds on both the ad buyers and the ad sellers and make sure the house always gets its percentage. In order for Google to go under, a large number of online businesses would have to realize that online advertising is worthless, and lucky for Google a sucker is born every minute.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
If you have a contractual arrangement to be paid for clicks or views, and you rip off the other party. It doesn't particularly matter how easy or difficult it is to accomplish the breach of contract. If they catch you, they can make a case against you.
Of course if you base your business around bad technology that is easy to trick, I totally agree you shouldn't be surprised if there is rampant abuse.
Senior SW Engineer/Architect - IANAL
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire