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.

Comments

Re:Why...

[PopeRatzo]

I think the reason that they mention "people of color" separately (I don't know why they didn't just say minorities), is that being a person of color is correlated with having low income.

That's not the reason. People of color are generally shut out of the same banking products that we take for granted.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10...

There's been several studies now that show that with a black family and white family with exactly the same income and credit scores, the black family is less likely to be given loans and more likely to be steered toward "sub-prime" type of banking products, even though they're repayment rates are the same.

http://www.epi.org/publication...

https://www.nerdwallet.com/blo...