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Google Bans Ads For Payday Loans (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Google has decided it doesn't want to promote predatory lending practices that are harmful to consumers, so the company has decided to ban ads for payday loans and some related products from their ads systems. "Research has shown that these loans can result in unaffordable payment and high default rates for users so we will be updating our policies globally to reflect that," Google's product policy director, David Graff, writes in a blog post. Payday loans often come with extremely high interest rates if they aren't paid back immediately, which can push people further in debt. Georgetown's Center on Privacy and Technology notes in a statement, "Payday lenders profit from people's weaknesses -- particularly poor people and people of color. Every time someone clicks on those ads, search engines profit, too." While Google may lose some revenue in the short-run by removing these ads, the move will likely benefit the company in the long-run (positive PR doesn't hurt) as Google users should have more trust in the ads they come across. Payday loans will be banned from Google globally starting June 13th.
Now when are they going to ban this one weird trick that almost broke the Internet among all the other forms of idiot bait.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
April is already over.
Now we just need to ban ads for racists, wahabbists, republicans and video games. Tout suite!
If you truly believe that I have a *stack* of junk mail I can give you. I get at least 5-10 pieces of snail mail a week from the RNC.
The RNC is just as capable of sucking people out of money. Both sides play the game of 'they are taking away the rights we told you about'.
Even if such loans are "predatory" and "harmful" to consumers, this will just increase the strength of the variables that Google sees as being predatory and harmful in the first place. It's unfortunate that, due to either ignorance or cynicism, Google is the one harming consumers the most. http://reason.com/blog/2016/05...
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
and raise 2 harmfuls. maybe your ad is next.
users should have more trust in the ads they come across
Hahahahaha, no. That ship sailed a long time ago.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Did he REALLY say that? Ok no exactly but what would make "people of colour’s" weaknesses any more vulnerable than 'white people' (though of course white is a colour too so this whole differentiation is racist to begin with).
O what he MEANT was that by percentage 'people of colour' are more poor than others...but he already said 'pool' so why would the extra distinction be necessary? O, of course so we can throw in the race card of course. But how about we just leave this at 'weaknesses of the poor'...what does it MATTER what colour they are?
Push come to shove I'm absolutely disgusted & fed-up with this whole 'people of colour' thing like there are people who have a colour & others that don't...besides its just a way to say 'non-white' but if they actually said 'non-white' that would be OBVIOUSLY racist rather than allowing stupid people to believe they aren't actually being racist....
Do we have to bring race into everything. Payday loans prey on poor people, period end of story. People of both color and means dont fall prey to payday loans schemes, in fact i'd say its racist to suggest they do.
so called "payday loans" may indeed be harmful. however there is a method to ban harmful things; democratically enacted legislation. (indeed some states and countries have baned them).
but should we trust and rely on big corps like google to nanny us and make us safe according to their own vague moral code?
would google next decide interest over certain percentage as harmful? perhaps google would decide all interest taking as usury, and ( like some fundamental religious nuts/muslim countries now, and many Christian ones in past) ban all interest loan ads?
where is the limit ?
of course google wont ban other loan ads, and many other 'harmful' ads, because that would be harmful to its bottom line.
may be google's limit on 'do no evil' absurdity is how much of its revenue will be effected by such decisions.
and there is nothing wrong with that . companies are supposed to pay attention to their bottom line.
but don't be a hypocrite and launch pr stunts like this, taking a public holier than thou attitude, because you ban some "evil" that conveniently do little harm to your profits, while ignoring other "evils" that may harm your profits.
This is just a token gesture by the google trying to convince us "Don't be evil" is still relevant, when now the actual motto is "All your attention are belong to google".
Oh yes. It also persuades me that the payday lender ads were not particularly profitable, so the token gesture was cheap enough.
Here are a couple of suggestions that the google could implement if they actually cared about being less evil:
1. Stop supporting scammers in Google Play by exposing the business models. They don't have to force the developers to reveal every detail of their business model, but they could provide a "financial model" tab and let the developer have his say, in many cases followed by supporting commentary for the parts the google can actually check on. It would also be a natural place for google to report on any complaints against the developer, but the basic idea is to give us sufficient information to make informed choices about which apps to install. (Obviously it should be linked to the permissions page so we could assess such things as whether the developer's business model for a flashlight app actually justifies permission to read our Contacts.)
2. Stop supporting spammers dropboxes for the suckers (especially for 419 scams). Seems like a no-brainer, but evidently google can't figure out a way to shut the spammers down quickly enough to discourage them. Hey, google. Why don't you let us help you? I'd be glad to flag the dropbox so you can nuke it before the spammer can harvest the suckers. (Same approach can be expanded to ALL email harvesting with a simple convention: If some other email service is slow about nuking the spammers' dropboxes, then Gmail can become slow for ALL of the email to and from that email service.)
3. Stop supporting wholesale pwning on YouTube. This one is especially amazing in terms of the brazenness of the criminal enterprise and the many years it has gone on. The same obvious searches will still produce pages of fresh pwn-your-computer results that could again be dealt with. Obviously google is profiting from supporting these criminals and their zombot networks, though I can't imagine how. It seems like they are just supporting competitors for stealing attention.
4. Stop stealing our personal information. Okay, that one isn't practical given the nature of the monster the google has become, but at least they could give us some options to make the theft less obvious. Take Gmail as an example. They system could be inverted (as an option, perhaps a paid option) with all of my email stored on MY computer and the analysis and search requests (for the same ads) could be run locally on my end.
What we REALLY need is an economic system that would let a non-EVIL company compete effectively against the google by offering such anti-EVIL services and options.
My own motto these years is "Additional detailed suggestions available upon polite request, but I'm not holding my breath."
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Thank you for legislating morality! Where would we be without our supreme leaders in charge deciding what we should see?
If you are poor or have bad money management you may have a choice like.
1) Having your electricity turned off.
2) Overdrafting your checking or exceeding your credit card limit triggering large fees
3) Going to payday lending service and paying the fee.
I assume the payday lending fee is much less than option 2. This is the only reason why banks are so angry and lobby to get rid of their competitors.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
So will Google lend money to these high risk, low equity individuals, whose only way to live through the month before the next paycheck arrives may be by borrowing money from these so called 'loan sharks', people who are willing to lend money out to the highest risk individuals?
You can't handle the truth.
It's a nice gesture, but they need to drive through my old neighborhood sometime. In the southeast, it used to be that the liquor store to church ratio was the gauge of a town's squalor. These days, you can't go drive down a street without passing a handful of payday loan places. Internet advertising isn't to draw people in who otherwise wouldn't consider a payday loan, it's to make sure your slice of the pie is the biggest. Some cities pass ordinances limiting the number of payday loan places, but in many towns, one place can easily become five. As a result, keeping an adequate flow of new customers becomes increasingly important. Buying ads for "payday loan bessemer alabama" is just one way to do that, and is honestly preferable to the ongoing battle for "most obnoxious LED display" that many places are engaging in.
In my area, they're extremely aggressive: I live in a apartment complex, and they apparently buy names/addresses from the credit agencies. I used to receive about 3-4 "personal loan" offers from the local payday place a year until I got around to renewing my prescreen opt out.
The Big 5 do a good job of hiding their payday loan companies, this will not make them happy.
These things are poison. Thinking of them in terms of interest rates just confuses the matter. Once someone living paycheck-to-paycheck uses a payday loan whose fees + interest works out to (say) 15% of their paycheck they basically have to live the next two weeks on just 85% of what they usually live off of. Thus guaranteeing they'll be short again next paycheck, forcing them to take another payday loan, and driving them further underwater.
When I learned that a not-insignificant number of our employees were using these, I got the board to approve no-fee advances on your paycheck for emergencies (i.e. on request once a month, after manager approval if you needed it more often - to prevent someone from abusing this to go from living paycheck-to-paycheck, to living half-paycheck-to-half-paycheck). If you're one week into the 2-week pay period, you've already earned your pay for that first week. The company is just holding onto your money to simplify the bookkeeping. If you have an emergency and need to tap that paycheck early, there's really no reason for the company to refuse (unless they're also surviving payroll to payroll).
The long-term solution is to build up enough savings so you aren't living paycheck-to-paycheck. But employer-approved pay advances can help stop someone from slipping into the negative due to a one-time unexpected expense, at which point these loan sharks will make sure they stay underwater.
And contrary to what someone else commented, these loans do not prey on poor people. This isn't an income problem, it's a cashflow problem. You can be poor (low income) and never need a payday loan (income > expenses, and have sufficient savings to tide you over to next paycheck in the event of an emergency). These loans prey on people living paycheck-to-paycheck. You can be rich and run into the exact same problem if your expenses exceed your income and you don't have a savings buffer. That's how professional athletes and celebrities wind up going bankrupt.
Debbie "Downer" Wasserman-Shultz, the queen of the DNC and a huge Hillary! supporter is heavily supported by Payday Loan industry.
I guess she probably will have to use Duck Duck Go.
Still hate typos (and I did Preview carefully). Near the end, "They system" should be "The system" or even "Gmail" specifically.
Looking over the other comments, I'm rather astounded by the defenses of loan sharks. Obviously paid shills or actual sharks, but it reminds me to wish that slashdot had some reputation-based options. My own simpleminded setting would probably be to hide any account that is not old enough. Not sure if two months would be long enough, but the setting should be tweakable by the user.
Ditto motto.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I'm a bit curious about why you think Google should be checking into a business model - and, really, what does that phrase actually mean?
The second makes me curious... What the hell is "dropboxes?" (I'm kind of fluent in criminal terminology (2 proficiency slots in Thieve's Cant.) What's that?
Also, why would they trust users or are you saying that you should flag them and they should review 'em?
I'm not actually sure why you'd expect Google (or really want, I guess) to do such things. Me? I just want them to give me search results.
I have no idea what you mean by pwning YouTube. I know what pwning is. Who's distributing malware by Google or hacking users through YouTube directly?
Are you talking about the links that people put in the description that take you off-site? I only see those when I'm hunting for copyrighted material.
The last one (I think) is "stealing your personal information." Err... They stole your information? How? They DO say they're slurping up your information and, in fact, make it part of their agreement to let you use their stuff. I'm not really sure where you're going with that one. I see them doing something I don't like (slurping up data) but they do make it pretty clear that that's what they're doing so I'm not sure that the word stealing applies. There might be something that I'm unaware of.
To the best of my knowledge, Google has no information about me that I didn't give to them. Well, there was the wireless router thing. I guess that'd count but I suspect that's not what you mean because that's long-since gone.
Then, I might be crazy, but didn't this:
My own motto these years is "Additional detailed suggestions available upon polite request, but I'm not holding my breath."
appear in another thread from earlier today? Again, I'm not sure what you're going for.
I should mention that I've been quite pissed with Google for a long time. So, I'm not asking these questions just to be obtuse. I'm actually the guy that gave up on Android and got a Windows Phone. So, I'm really not a fanboy or anything. I do use YouTube. I do have a GMail account that doesn't get used. I do, actually use their search.
A note on that last part. I use their search AND I have profile set up so that it returns personalized responses. They're pretty good and come at a price - privacy. So, I do two things... I only let Google get my information when I give it to them on that particular page. I block all Google stuff (including images and fonts) by default by means of uMatrix. So, I'm not actually being tracked with their other stuff like analytics or tag. In fact, I need to go out of my way in order to even see their CAPTCHA - it simply does not load. (That has led to some interesting periods of confusion and some frustration but I consider it worth it.)
So, yeah, I'm mostly just curious about the personal information theft. See, I know how the 'net works and I don't actually consider tracking (if that's what you're even going for) to be theft. In fact, I consider people having given consent to such when they visit some third party site that has chosen to use their analytics or whatnot. I really can't think of any data that Google might have that I didn't give away by direct actions on my part. Yes, they index comments I make. They index a site or two. I don't actually consider that theft - I consider that being them doing their job.
Oh, forgot this... It's tempting to mention that "information wants to be free." That's not really my point. My point is that you're putting stuff out there knowing that it's going to be indexed (or, something?) and that you expect them to do some vague things with words that you have a cryptic definition for. I can not actually parse what is wholesale pwning of YouTube and I'm kind of fluent in computer (even blackhat) terminology.
It's almost as if you're asking Google to exert more contr
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Afu
Thanks a lot, thats Great !
If your car breaks down and you take a payday loan to get it fixed and not lose what job you have, it's a positive development for you even if you have to pay extra $20 on pay day. If you end up taking a loan before every paycheck, not so much.
Bottom line, even low income / high risk individuals can benefit from access to some kind of legal credit, even on lousy terms. Lots in developing world don't, hence the movement to provide microloans.
In the ideal world, payday lenders would be akin to credit unions, paying moderate salaries to local employees and redistributing any additional income between the same members who occasionally take the loans.
But even if such things do not exist yet, we should think twice before saying no to people with urgent need of immediate extra cash. Otherwise, they will have no choice but to go to the mob, where loans will cost an arm and a leg. And I mean, literally if you don't pay up.
Dear Google, please also ban ads with great big "download" buttons on software-download pages. I hate those. Their sole point is to deceive.
All usury should be banned, no matter how 'small' the interest rate is.
...have an obligation to help those high risk low equity individuals or serve ads for payday loan companies?
Google is a corporation and corporations are people. People as in individuals. Individuals have the right to discriminate all they want.
What do you want? That big nanny government force government to serve ads they don't want to serve? Just like how they force bakeries to bake wedding cakes? You damn statist and collectist
Google has decided it doesn't want to promote predatory lending practices that are harmful to it's product.
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You *do* understand that a significant part of the reason people get paychecks at all is that the money remains in the original hands longer, right? The longer the delay before the money leaves the original place (your employer, paypal, google, whatever) the more money they can make with it.
It will be a very rare business indeed that will give up that advantage. A small one, most likely, that can't take advantage of having a large payroll sitting in its accounts earning interest for a few extra days.
I don't get any junk mail at all from the RNC (or the DNC for that matter). You must have gotten on their mailing list somehow.
However, even though both parties are very similar in many ways, they are beholden to different industries. The Republicans are in bed with the fossil fuel industry, for instance. Meanwhile, the Democrats are in bed with the media industries (MPAA/RIAA) as well as the payday-loan industry.
It's honestly really disgusting that the party that claims to be in favor of helping poor people is so happy to work for an industry that brazenly preys upon those poor people with usurious interest rates and fees. It doesn't help that Hillary is also sold out to private prison corporations, yet another industry that preys upon poor people by profiting off their incarceration for BS "crimes" (like drug possession) and which lobbies heavily for stronger laws to keep more people in prison.
I think we employers have a duty here to identify workers who are in financial trouble and help them out. Perhaps not by giving them advances or their own version of payday loans, but by helping them with financial planning.
I started this at my company about 3 years ago. I have about 20 employees who work jobs at the lower end of the wage spectrum (about $11/hr, semi-rural SC), so I started bringing in a local financial planner once a quarter to meet with anyone in the company who wanted to (55 of us, including me, the owner) and go over financial plans and concerns.
Even some of my higher salaried people started engaging him, and now I basically have a half-time financial planner on staff to help my employees do more with their paychecks.
The real shocker came, and this was completely unexpected, but in retrospect makes total sense, is that employees who started having small successes with their finances for the first time in their lives started having more small successes at work. A few of them were able to get a handle on their impulsive spending decisions, and that helped them get a handle on their impulsive work decisions as well.
We all know that impulse control is very important to being successful, and just by creating an environment where someone can start enjoying small successes, they were helped immensely in the bigger problem.
So, I may be a very small-time CEO who still has a few minutes a day to check Slashdot, but I'd highly recommend to anyone who will listen and is also an exec of a business, and who has workers who may struggle financially, pay the money for a financial planner to come work with your employees. You might be as shocked as I was with the good return on that investment.
Not "polite request".
Not saying you're a troll or whatever, but that's because I don't care that much about you, at least based upon that "response".
I don't feel like apologizing for writing about complicated topics. If I were a serious author then at least I would care about simplifying my writing or motivating readers to make sufficient efforts to understand them, eh?
So I'll follow your lead and change the topic. My new topic is the moderation system. There should be several orthogonal dimensions with plus and minus scoring. On the "polite" dimension, your reply deserves a negative mod point. I think there should also be a dimension for "thought provoking", though I don't like that particular label, and that is the dimension where I would like to earn the most positive mod points. There should also be a dimension for "sincere", and I would like to earn positive mod points there, too, but I'm mentioning it here because I think the ability to award negative mod points should be related to your own received mod points, and in this example, someone with a net negative sincerity would not be able to award negative mod points for sincerity. (I think the real trolls would have large negative scores for politeness and sincerity, but that's just a research hypothesis.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.