It's an excessively common scam nowadays that everybody is requiring an eVisa or electronic travel notice.
Fun story:
Once I was traveling to a country X that I was familiar enough with to know that thir governmental services web sites were awfully designed. We're talking about web design that would easily put Geocities to shame.
They had recently introduced an eVisa scheme that I have to complete.
Out of tirednes and being in a rush, I clicked at the wrong link. It gets me into a shiny, modern web page with nice graphics and a form to complete.
I instinctively think "WAIT! This is TOO nice for an official site!".
Then I look at the address bar, see an obvious scam-SEO URL, realize my mistake, and go back to search for the real one.
I'm not sure how Google can't be held responsible for this. They're literally advertising scams. They're taking money for putting up an ad for a scam site.
I don't know how there is an excuse for this that's acceptable to any authority. It's their own platform that they seem unable to control.
Take some responsibility Google, you are profiting by facilitating evil (even moreso than by regular advertising).
> I'm not sure how Google can't be held responsible for this. They're literally advertising scams. They're taking money for putting up an ad for a scam site.
The thing I don't understand is why people keep expecting them to. Who even wants Google to be the police? To actually act as a deterrent you need the ability to impose penalties, and for that you need the actual police.
All Google can do is close their account, and then there are no real penalties so they just make new ones until they figure out how to beat the fraud detection system.
And if you try to impose penalties on third parties for not being able to solve a problem they're structurally unable to solve, all they can do is crank up the false positive rate and mess things up for innocent people.
Stop even asking for this. It's a dystopia. Put the actual scammers in prison instead.
I don't understand your position at all (and I don't mean this aggressively, I just can't get myself into a position of understanding). From my current perspective you seem to be absolving Google of any responsibility for, literally, their product.
My reasoning is:
Google have created an advertising platform. It is their raison d'etre; their entire millions per hour profit engine. But they only built the easy, profitable half because there were / are no regulations to enforce the responsible, difficult half.
They built the half that allows anyone with the money to put something on their platform. They didn't build the half that makes sure that they're not helping scammers, con artists, and outright criminals from reaching the global audience that their wonderful, profitable, scalable platform enables.
They should be policing it on their own to an extent that obvious scams and fake banking websites and clickbait should be detected. Even just to appear to not be a crime-facilitation platform, which they currently are.
To me it feels analogous to Microsoft and their commitment to security of Windows. It's not a priority because it's counter to profitability. Privatise the profits and socialise the costs.
If they can't control their own platform, they should not have the platform. It is not a mature enough product to be released upon the world. It is Frankenstein's monster, left to roam.
I would be supportive of legislation that outright banned advertising with Google until they were able to provably clean up their act; if their product was market-ready.
Which three letter agency said that an ad blocker was a required layer of security when browsing the web? There's a good reason: Google. If the Internet is full of scams, who is most responsible for its proliferation?
(I have a massive bias against advertising, so that heavily colours my opinion. I also understand that advertising is inevitable, but it should be held to a much higher standard than, well, the none that exists)
Newspapers and TV channels were held to Truth in Advertising Laws, and obvious scams would trigger law suits, from consumer groups, from the FCC itself sometimes, from rival newspapers and TV channels.
Google has enough of a near-monopoly in ads that there aren't rivals scaled enough to defend the public good out of the greed of their pocket books if not the good of everyone else. Google's competitors are too busy selling ad space to the same and similar lowest common denominator polluters and scammers than to police Google enough to hope to put it out of business.
The FCC gave up on policing anything on the internet ages ago. Between Congressional protections and multiple administrations trying to keep the FCC weak, it doesn't seem to have enough power to do anything towards Google.
I suppose that leaves consumer advocacy groups. I don't know how we build and scale a Consumers Against Predatory Google Ads to the point that it can force Google to reconsider their approach to advertising for the consumer good instead of evil. But then I also don't understand how Google isn't already doing tremendous enough damage to their brand that there isn't already enough of a sentiment that Google is actively engaged in evil and needs to stop, five or six years ago at least (or maybe at least as far back as when Google bought/merged Doubleclick). Their brand, too, seems too big to fail at this point, and it is weird to me.
> Google have created an advertising platform. It is their raison d'etre; their entire millions per hour profit engine. But they only built the easy, profitable half because there were / are no regulations to enforce the responsible, difficult half.
Baked into this is the assumption that the "responsible, difficult half" is something that they, rather than law enforcement, should be doing to begin with. Which they can't do effectively because they don't have the ability to impose significant penalties and we certainly don't want to give them that.
Consider how this is even supposed to work. There is often no conclusive way to tell ex ante whether some website is a scam; the premise of them is to look like a real site. Google doesn't know if it's a scammer or some third party contractor who has be commissioned by the actual entity to set up a new site, and real sites are often full of bad UI choices and weird bugs, or open up to nothing more than a login page which the ad network has no credentials to get past.
The way this works with actual law enforcement is that someone suspects a site of being a scam, or a victim files a police report, and then officers investigate. They spend significant resources to figure out if it's actually a scam or just e.g. a competitor trying to have their competition removed from visibility. They have special powers to conduct searches with probable cause. And then if it is a scam, they arrest the scammers, and if it's a false report, they charge that person for filing a false police report, which are necessary in order to provide a deterrent and prevent both of those misbehaviors from proliferating.
Otherwise you get untold numbers of false reports from people trying to grief their rivals, it takes just as much work to do a thorough investigation for each one, and then even if you catch the actual scammers, they just immediately reappear under a different name.
So then they get zillions of reports, many of them fraudulent, and you're proposing to put them in jail if they ever fail to do something they there is no apparent way for them to consistently do.
> I would be supportive of legislation that outright banned advertising with Google until they were able to provably clean up their act; if their product was market-ready.
Consider how this would apply to anything other than advertising. Some bank robbers buy Halloween masks to hide their faces. Drug dealers sell drugs over the internet and a normal mail/package carrier delivers the packages. A hitman rides the bus on the way to a hit. These are felonies! But we don't expect UPS to cut open everyone's packages or the bus driver to strip search every passenger to check for a vial of polonium, and punish them if they ever fail, because that isn't their job. They're not the police.
I understand your point a lot better now, thank you. And I like the 'public cars / roads' example and have possibly used it myself in discussions about cryptography and government backdoors etc.
Respectfully, however, I still disagree in this case, although I'm struggling how to articulate why - beyond admitting it could just be my bias against advertising.
My best attempt at articulation is:
Google have built a private road over the top of the public road, that is then spilling sewage and toxic materials onto the public road. Google's private road purely serves to profit Google. There's no public good it is serving, not like a public road or electricity infrastructure.
In writing that, yes, it's a government policy / legislation / regulation failure. But also, Google should be doing better. However, as WorldMaker said above, their brand seems somewhat confusingly, unaffected, so Google has incentive to do better than bottom-of-the-barrel.
As such I can't lay no blame, or anything less than majority blame, at Google's feet. Yes, government's around the world should be doing better at containing the spilling of toxic waste into public spaces that Google both facilitates and turns a blind eye to. Google are too profitable to fail since they can buy the continued regulation vacuum.
I'm not sure how far that went off the rails, I may have just continued ranting a bit there.
Thank you for your replies, though, I do see it from a slightly different angle.
We want the actual police (law enforcement) to enforce the law and the includes google. If someone reports that this is a scam to them, and they don't act (i.e. take reasonable measures to check), then they become a party to that fraud. We already have laws about this and they are breaking them.
I don't want them to be the police. I want them to give me the thing that I'm searching for first, not whoever outspent everyone else on SEO this year. If I'm searching for "Canadian visa application" then the first result must be the official government website for this. No policing involved - just good old accurate search, like Google used to be known for.
You're in luck! If you search for "canadian visa application" the first two results are "Visit Canada" and "How to apply for a visitor visa" on https://www.canada.ca/
On my phone I get several screenheights of sponsored links, with oh so helpful sitelinks and summaries of each scam site. The fourth result is the legit one.
Interesting, I'm surprised the results vary so much for a query with such an objectively correct answer. I tested it on my desktop in private browsing mode because I wanted to see whether Kagi was much better, but figured I should report the null result when Google actually did fine.
Nowadays 90% of the "Sponsored" category that I see are scams and clickbait sites The most "innocent" of them are competitor ads trying to convert you from what you're actually searching for.
Unfortunately there are no incentives for Google to fix this. Apparently they make too much money out of it.
South Korean internet is dysfunctional enough that it's possible that Google is not showing the correct site at the top because the government site's designer helpfully decided to make the site "secure" by adding to robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Source: Worked at Google Korea years ago. Back then, those things were common, and were commonly accepted as a solution to the problem "All your user's profiles are available in plain text, open to public, and searchable from Google!"
You think this is bad? Try getting visa for Europe within the UK as a citizen of a 3rd world country. The official process is through a service such as VFS, which is the most painful experience I've had with any sort of service. There are very few appointments, all of which are blocked out by 3rd party bots, which means you need to pay a 3rd party twice as much to get any appointment. The VFS website is riddled with bot deterrents that actuall just deter humans, such as entering your password through a non-qwerty, randomised, on screen keyboard. If you call their helpline, you get charged for it. Everything is an upsell. You fill in a pdf form, print it out, give it to them and then they look at the printed document and type it back into their computer. There are literaly queues of people standing on the street outside their offices because they offer no seating, like the queues outside a club. Oh and you have to submit biometrics every single time, and therefore go in person for these apponitments that are impossible to get. I once had to submit my biometrics thrice in the same year for italian visa
Going through VFS seems like going through one of those expensive third parties instead of direct. And each EU country has a different visa service AFAIK, so the procedure will in fact vary depending on where you are going. (not saying the experience is not horrible).
Setting aside the scam aspect, I find it depressing that places that used to be visa free for residents of certain countries have now instituted visa-but-not-a-visa with a fee across the board.
Visiting the US from the UK I used to have to fill in the green "Visa waiver" form, but it was free, short, and blanks were handed out on the flight in. Now I must file an ESTA ahead of time and pay a fee. Visitors to the EU and UK (and even between the EU and UK) will have similar advance paperwork.
It feels like a huge step backwards with very dubious advantages compared to the unwelcoming "fuck you pay me" feel of the encounter. There's nothing I like more when choosing a holiday destination than filling in a multi page bureaucrat-designed form and paying a fee for the pleasure.
A minor blip in the greater scheme of things, but it saddens me.
There's a strange (for someone from Eastern Europe) zone around public services where shady individual thrive: like buying vignettes - you may buy "directly" from the state (nemzetiutdij.hu, eznamka.sk, edalnice.cz) or by some middleman that brings nothing to the process but has a ~20% commission.
In the UK this happens with tax rebates. For the vast majority of people your tax is calculated by HMRC and taken out of your pay and if they make a mistake you just tell them and they will adjust your tax code so you pay less/more tax until it works out.
Some shady companies set themselves up as middlemen and pocket a large proportion of the rebate when you can do it yourself in minutes through an online portal.
I've never experienced any government process where paying a third party would have simplified things. I've also never heard of any third party offerings for that purpose. Could you share some examples?
Not sure about now, but last year your only way of getting a digital vignette for the Austrian highway that is valid “today” was via a third party (from outside Austria, I think).
Austrian ASFINAG would only sell you one that is valid in ~2 week at the earliest, since that’s the time you are guaranteed by law to return it. Not very handy if you are already on the road, and don’t want to stop to buy a physical vignette.
It generally means someone translating your information to the format the government employees expect, because each attempt costs multiple weeks of waiting. Basically, if there is a 6-week response time, you want to get it right on the first try.
In other cases, you pay people to save yourself the hassle of fighting for an appointment slot, and to save a trip across town in the middle of a work day. These fixers become the somewhat digital layer to a famously analog bureaucracy.
I've never had this issue with any government communication in Germany. Also, all appointments I need can be booked online, so I never had to pay someone for them (wouldn't even come to my mind). Maybe it's more of an issue for particular cities?
Is it safe to assume that you were born in Germany? The system is a lot less friendly to newcomers who have to do everything at once. It's full of catch 22 situations.
That aside, Germany is a federation and every state, city, office and employee adds a layer of variance for a given process.
In Greece, traditionally, we tend to consider Germany as the almost ultimate place in regards to reliability, efficiency, etc. It's a bit soothing to discover that almost everywhere everybody has the same issues (the difference in magnitude matters, of course)
It's a myth. Germans are methodical and risk-averse, but definitely not efficient. Things to get stuck at the precise point in time when they were over-engineered, and never move from there.
As a result, German bureaucracy tends to rely solely on paper and in-person appointments. With every state, every city, every office and every employee having their own interpretation of a procesd, you get an unpredictable, opaque, drawn out process that drives people mad.
There is a famous Asterix and Obelix scene about an office that drives people mad with bureaucracy. The protagonists are hunting for the Pass A38. This scene is better known in German than in its original French for a reason.
I think its overgeneralizing, but mostly accurate to say that the human-free constructs built by the Germans are quite efficient, but the human processes, systems, and interactions by which they get to these other results are byzantine at best, Kafkaesque at worst.
Perhaps the two are even related. American companies will reach 3 9's of reliability for a device, call it sufficient, and ship a product. German companies will be engaged with not only internal stakeholders, but also various levels of government for weeks to months just to come to an agreement about what the acceptable threshold is (it's the highest asked for by the combined pool of stakeholders), and 18 months after the Americans hit the market, you'll have a wristwatch with 7 9's of reliability that costs 3x as much as the American one.
These times are long gone. Not only with government efficiency, but the transition to digital services, railroad services, you name it. And yet people voted for a 68 year old Blackrock manager without any kind of governmental expertise on any level as their new saviour.
Having lived in Germany for five years, this is a total myth. The German administration is a tire fire, I mean a filing cabinet fire. First lesson is: learn to wait. Have to do things at the municipality or the Finanzamt? Prepare to reserve 1-2 hours of your day, because you will have to wait a lot. And then the administration is pretty chaotic because (for historical reasons) they do not want to link administrations. Then they do random things like accidentally changing your and your partner's tax brackets in the middle of the year. My wife (who is German) chased them until they would fix it and they had no clue how it happened. Other foreign colleagues often had similar issues.
The same is true by the way with non-government stuff like medical care. Have an appointment with your GP or a medical specialist? Great, the appointment only means that you have to be there at a certain time. They will let you wait an hour or two without any remorse (what's the point of an appointment)?
Nothing is efficient in Germany. Reliability is also a meme at this point. Even 10 years ago, about 1/4-1/2 of the ICE trains I took would have a serious delay (which usually ended being a 2-3 hour delay if you have to cross a border). We just came back from vacation in Germany (it continues to be a beautiful country with nice people) with our electric car. The charging infrastructure is deplorable. Not only they have only a small number of chargers available (even a lot of highway stops only have two chargers), so impossible to charge on a busy day. But not only that, a lot of chargers are broken and nobody really cares for fixing them.
Sorry for the rant. tl;dr: Germany is not efficient and not reliable.
My favourite anecdote regarding German EV chargers - I was trying to charge at a motorway stop couple years back, and the stupid charger needs an app, ok, got the app. And it's even in English, success! But.....when I try to add a payment card it says the billing address has to be in Germany. Ok, I'm determined so I ring their helpline.....only to be told it's open Monday to Saturday 9am till 4pm(it was Sunday).
Honestly never seen this issue in any other EU country.
I'm doing my best! I think I have made Berlin's bureaucracy a lot more approachable, but there's only so much you can do as a single person without official backing.
Or if spun around, it's incredible what can be done by a single motivated person, and sad that the entire bureaucratic apparatus is incapable of doing it.
In Germany, we had a private company that offered a service no one needed to pay the household bill on public broadcasting.
If their SEO ranking beats the official site, they could confuse the hell out of people. (And I am told people do not use uBlock or Pihole everywhere, so paid ads would work, too.)
Do people not use their own government as the entry point for visa applications? I just go to the website of the foreign office of my government which has a list of the requirements to enter every country in the world and what needs to be done and how. I have never started with a google search.
I wonder how much of a bright line can be drawn to distinguish these sites that charge to “help” you through some governmental process vs like TurboTax.
My industry (immigration to Germany) has many of these services. The line is easy to draw: the cost should be proportional to the convenience it creates.
Basically, is it a service or an unlicensed toll booth?
I wonder how many people have paid for International Drivers Permits from scam websites. In the US these are only issued by AAA, and until recently they were only available by mail or in person, creating an opening for grifters to sell print-at-home PDFs.
(The concept seems outdated, and I've successfully rented cars abroad without an IDP at all. Also, isn't it weird that authority to issue these is delegated to AAA, and them only?)
IDPs are still very much useful and needed - short of the world agreeing on a single standard for what a driving license should look like, they're a lot more practical than expecting everyone to understand 192 different formats (and a few crazy countries like the USA even issue dozens of different license formats within the country). Delegating it to some random driving-related third party is slightly weird but not that weird (in my country they're done by the Post Office, which is arguably weirder, but I guess they also handle passport applications so it makes a certain amount of sense from that perspective).
There are many countries where just having a standard-ish license with English is perfectly fine. I think last time we had a thread on this topic someone mentioned a few countries where that wasn't true but most of Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, (edit: UK), and a bunch of other countries will just take your local plastic license as long as it has English on it.
I have never driven a car outside of my own country, and I always wondered how they even allow you to drive a car without getting re-trained in a country where the driving system is so different than where you obtained your license (I'm looking at you, Commonwealth countries). Isn't it difficult to adapt to left-side driving while having used to right-side? It surely needs a little bit of adapting as a pedestrian.
I've driven in many countries including some pretty crazy ones and ones that drive on the wrong side of the road. You adjust/adapt ;) Every now and then though I still turned on the windshield wipers instead of signalling... And when the roads were completely empty you sometimes don't think and almost turn into the wrong lane... And roundabouts are also fun, like driving in Paris with their crazy multi-lane roundabouts.
The funny thing is e.g. in Canada, if you move there from certain countries, you can drive for 6 months on your foreign license, but then you have to take a road test to get a Canadian license!
> The funny thing is e.g. in Canada, if you move there from certain countries, you can drive for 6 months on your foreign license, but then you have to take a road test to get a Canadian license!
That's pretty normal, a lot of countries do something similar. They want to permit tourists and people on temporary work assignments to drive, but if you're actually moving to Canada for the long term they expect you to take a proper test.
Contrary to the sibling commenters, I found this pretty tricky to do; I was always too close to the curb or the lane marker, I lost my natural sense of where my car was positioned on the road. I have the same general surprise that you can just use a US license to drive in Europe --- but you can. The IDP seems pretty silly, especially knowing what little it takes to pick one up.
You could certainly question the wisdom of allowing short-term foreign visitors to drive on their foreign licenses, but taking that policy decision as a given the IDP is a reasonable implementation of it (even if I suspect its main function is to attach a fraud penalty to the "Prawo Jazdy" wheeze). Maybe something akin to the machine-readable passport code would be an improvement, but considering how long the likes of Real ID adoption have taken and that the IDP system isn't particularly broken, I can see why that wouldn't be prioritised.
> Isn't it difficult to adapt to left-side driving while having used to right-side?
You get used to it after a few minutes. It takes a bit more concentration, especially when turning out of one-way streets, but it's otherwise fine.
There are mutual recognition agreements between many pairs of countries. The UK, for example, will allow you to directly exchange a licence from an EU or EEA, a British Crown Dependency, or a 'designated country' (Andorra, Australia, Barbados, British Virgin Islands, Canada, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Faroe Islands, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Japan, Moldova, Monaco, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Republic of North Macedonia, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates and Zimbabwe) for a British licence with no need for a retest. Most of those countries drive on the 'wrong' side of the road.
The hardest part of learning to drive on the left is not turning on your windshield wipers every time you turn a corner.
Really though, the actual driving part is pretty easy to pick up. You get accustommed to it quickly. You're more likely to have problems crossing the street on foot (you'll look the wrong way for traffic) than driving.
> The hardest part of learning to drive on the left is not turning on your windshield wipers every time you turn a corner.
This is something to learn the very first time when getting into a (new/unfamiliar) car before getting the vehicle moving.
Come to India and drive a few cars from different brands. [1] The rule is to drive on the left side of the road (so the driver is on the right side of the vehicle). But the sticks/levers to turn on the windshield wiper may be on the right side of the steering wheel or on the left side (and vice versa for the turn indicator sticks/levers), depending on the manufacturer. If you don’t check it in advance, you may end up wiping the windshield when you want to signal a turn or end up signaling a turn when you want to get water off the windshield.
[1]: Actually, it’s not recommended for foreigners to attempt to drive in India. The traffic is chaotic and one needs a different way of thinking to drive.
Accidentally turning on the wipers was definitely #1 for me. A close second was nearly turning the wrong way in roundabouts. I’m not sure why regular box turns were easy to mentally flip but roundabouts just broke my brain instead.
Realistically the answer is probably that countries accept a certain risk of collisions in the interest of good international relations and the resulting tourism and business. They might also trust visitors to pay more attention. There are rules that attempt to restrict the abuse of IDPs (e.g. available for a max period of 1 year and only available in your home country, and in some countries it may be illegal for people on longer-term visa statuses to use them), but it's all tradeoffs. I can imagine that e.g. Uber might be lobbying politicians to make them less widely available, and they may succeed.
An IDP isn't a driving licence; it's an internationally-agreed and -recognised document that asserts that 'this other document I have is a driving licence.' I think the main value of an IDP is that it avoids this sort of situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DQBc3eFUlU
I don't think it would, because this happened because of the old format paper Irish driver's licenses which had the driver's name in the top left hand corner, where prawo jazdy was written on the polish plastic cards.
But anyway, IDPs will never be required in the EU.
This scam is everywhere: set up a website to "middleman" yourself into the application process of any online permit/certificate/authorization, make it look as similar to an official website as possible, game up your way to first place in search results through SEO, profit.
It's not even illegal in many places. There are still a ton of legitimate lawyery/agency business outlets that do the same in physical form: They just complete forms for a hefty sum.
Sometimes they would also submit the forms / get the response back for you, which could be a real service in places where normally you would wait for a couple hours in a governmental office just to submit a form.
Isn't this abuse of the chargeback system? I was under the impression that chargebacks were for resolving otherwise unresolvable conflicts between the buyer and seller. Here the buyer didn't even attempt to get a refund from the seller before the chargeback.
If it was, the merchant could dispute the chargeback. It is not a one-sided process. They did not even try because I assume they knew they would lose the dispute.
I wonder if that's an American thing, every time I tried to do a chargeback here in the UK on a credit card my bank said they have to investigate first, give the seller an opportunity to respond, and only if that fails they will refund me after 60 days. While everything I see online suggests that Americans can pretty much do an at-will chargeback for any reason with instantaneous effect?
I used to work for an online retailer that sold high-ticket machinery parts. It wasn’t uncommon for us to face chargebacks on orders worth around $20,000. Eventually, we had to get chargeback insurance, because the only way to contest a chargeback was through a mercantile court.
please take a look at what they charge people who have to go through a whole visa process (for me, it starts at 179 USD to _apply_ (which may be rejected))
excluding all the time i'd have to spend and documents I'd have to collect
It's an excessively common scam nowadays that everybody is requiring an eVisa or electronic travel notice.
Fun story:
Once I was traveling to a country X that I was familiar enough with to know that thir governmental services web sites were awfully designed. We're talking about web design that would easily put Geocities to shame.
They had recently introduced an eVisa scheme that I have to complete.
Out of tirednes and being in a rush, I clicked at the wrong link. It gets me into a shiny, modern web page with nice graphics and a form to complete.
I instinctively think "WAIT! This is TOO nice for an official site!".
Then I look at the address bar, see an obvious scam-SEO URL, realize my mistake, and go back to search for the real one.
Which was as terribly designed as expected.
I hear about this repeatedly with South Korea - just googled and sure enough the first result is a sponsored scam site.
I'm not sure how Google can't be held responsible for this. They're literally advertising scams. They're taking money for putting up an ad for a scam site.
I don't know how there is an excuse for this that's acceptable to any authority. It's their own platform that they seem unable to control.
Take some responsibility Google, you are profiting by facilitating evil (even moreso than by regular advertising).
> I'm not sure how Google can't be held responsible for this. They're literally advertising scams. They're taking money for putting up an ad for a scam site.
The thing I don't understand is why people keep expecting them to. Who even wants Google to be the police? To actually act as a deterrent you need the ability to impose penalties, and for that you need the actual police.
All Google can do is close their account, and then there are no real penalties so they just make new ones until they figure out how to beat the fraud detection system.
And if you try to impose penalties on third parties for not being able to solve a problem they're structurally unable to solve, all they can do is crank up the false positive rate and mess things up for innocent people.
Stop even asking for this. It's a dystopia. Put the actual scammers in prison instead.
I don't understand your position at all (and I don't mean this aggressively, I just can't get myself into a position of understanding). From my current perspective you seem to be absolving Google of any responsibility for, literally, their product.
My reasoning is:
Google have created an advertising platform. It is their raison d'etre; their entire millions per hour profit engine. But they only built the easy, profitable half because there were / are no regulations to enforce the responsible, difficult half.
They built the half that allows anyone with the money to put something on their platform. They didn't build the half that makes sure that they're not helping scammers, con artists, and outright criminals from reaching the global audience that their wonderful, profitable, scalable platform enables.
They should be policing it on their own to an extent that obvious scams and fake banking websites and clickbait should be detected. Even just to appear to not be a crime-facilitation platform, which they currently are.
To me it feels analogous to Microsoft and their commitment to security of Windows. It's not a priority because it's counter to profitability. Privatise the profits and socialise the costs.
If they can't control their own platform, they should not have the platform. It is not a mature enough product to be released upon the world. It is Frankenstein's monster, left to roam.
I would be supportive of legislation that outright banned advertising with Google until they were able to provably clean up their act; if their product was market-ready.
Which three letter agency said that an ad blocker was a required layer of security when browsing the web? There's a good reason: Google. If the Internet is full of scams, who is most responsible for its proliferation?
(I have a massive bias against advertising, so that heavily colours my opinion. I also understand that advertising is inevitable, but it should be held to a much higher standard than, well, the none that exists)
Newspapers and TV channels were held to Truth in Advertising Laws, and obvious scams would trigger law suits, from consumer groups, from the FCC itself sometimes, from rival newspapers and TV channels.
Google has enough of a near-monopoly in ads that there aren't rivals scaled enough to defend the public good out of the greed of their pocket books if not the good of everyone else. Google's competitors are too busy selling ad space to the same and similar lowest common denominator polluters and scammers than to police Google enough to hope to put it out of business.
The FCC gave up on policing anything on the internet ages ago. Between Congressional protections and multiple administrations trying to keep the FCC weak, it doesn't seem to have enough power to do anything towards Google.
I suppose that leaves consumer advocacy groups. I don't know how we build and scale a Consumers Against Predatory Google Ads to the point that it can force Google to reconsider their approach to advertising for the consumer good instead of evil. But then I also don't understand how Google isn't already doing tremendous enough damage to their brand that there isn't already enough of a sentiment that Google is actively engaged in evil and needs to stop, five or six years ago at least (or maybe at least as far back as when Google bought/merged Doubleclick). Their brand, too, seems too big to fail at this point, and it is weird to me.
> Google have created an advertising platform. It is their raison d'etre; their entire millions per hour profit engine. But they only built the easy, profitable half because there were / are no regulations to enforce the responsible, difficult half.
Baked into this is the assumption that the "responsible, difficult half" is something that they, rather than law enforcement, should be doing to begin with. Which they can't do effectively because they don't have the ability to impose significant penalties and we certainly don't want to give them that.
Consider how this is even supposed to work. There is often no conclusive way to tell ex ante whether some website is a scam; the premise of them is to look like a real site. Google doesn't know if it's a scammer or some third party contractor who has be commissioned by the actual entity to set up a new site, and real sites are often full of bad UI choices and weird bugs, or open up to nothing more than a login page which the ad network has no credentials to get past.
The way this works with actual law enforcement is that someone suspects a site of being a scam, or a victim files a police report, and then officers investigate. They spend significant resources to figure out if it's actually a scam or just e.g. a competitor trying to have their competition removed from visibility. They have special powers to conduct searches with probable cause. And then if it is a scam, they arrest the scammers, and if it's a false report, they charge that person for filing a false police report, which are necessary in order to provide a deterrent and prevent both of those misbehaviors from proliferating.
Otherwise you get untold numbers of false reports from people trying to grief their rivals, it takes just as much work to do a thorough investigation for each one, and then even if you catch the actual scammers, they just immediately reappear under a different name.
So then they get zillions of reports, many of them fraudulent, and you're proposing to put them in jail if they ever fail to do something they there is no apparent way for them to consistently do.
> I would be supportive of legislation that outright banned advertising with Google until they were able to provably clean up their act; if their product was market-ready.
Consider how this would apply to anything other than advertising. Some bank robbers buy Halloween masks to hide their faces. Drug dealers sell drugs over the internet and a normal mail/package carrier delivers the packages. A hitman rides the bus on the way to a hit. These are felonies! But we don't expect UPS to cut open everyone's packages or the bus driver to strip search every passenger to check for a vial of polonium, and punish them if they ever fail, because that isn't their job. They're not the police.
I understand your point a lot better now, thank you. And I like the 'public cars / roads' example and have possibly used it myself in discussions about cryptography and government backdoors etc.
Respectfully, however, I still disagree in this case, although I'm struggling how to articulate why - beyond admitting it could just be my bias against advertising.
My best attempt at articulation is:
Google have built a private road over the top of the public road, that is then spilling sewage and toxic materials onto the public road. Google's private road purely serves to profit Google. There's no public good it is serving, not like a public road or electricity infrastructure.
In writing that, yes, it's a government policy / legislation / regulation failure. But also, Google should be doing better. However, as WorldMaker said above, their brand seems somewhat confusingly, unaffected, so Google has incentive to do better than bottom-of-the-barrel.
As such I can't lay no blame, or anything less than majority blame, at Google's feet. Yes, government's around the world should be doing better at containing the spilling of toxic waste into public spaces that Google both facilitates and turns a blind eye to. Google are too profitable to fail since they can buy the continued regulation vacuum.
I'm not sure how far that went off the rails, I may have just continued ranting a bit there.
Thank you for your replies, though, I do see it from a slightly different angle.
We want the actual police (law enforcement) to enforce the law and the includes google. If someone reports that this is a scam to them, and they don't act (i.e. take reasonable measures to check), then they become a party to that fraud. We already have laws about this and they are breaking them.
I don't want them to be the police. I want them to give me the thing that I'm searching for first, not whoever outspent everyone else on SEO this year. If I'm searching for "Canadian visa application" then the first result must be the official government website for this. No policing involved - just good old accurate search, like Google used to be known for.
You're in luck! If you search for "canadian visa application" the first two results are "Visit Canada" and "How to apply for a visitor visa" on https://www.canada.ca/
On my phone I get several screenheights of sponsored links, with oh so helpful sitelinks and summaries of each scam site. The fourth result is the legit one.
Interesting, I'm surprised the results vary so much for a query with such an objectively correct answer. I tested it on my desktop in private browsing mode because I wanted to see whether Kagi was much better, but figured I should report the null result when Google actually did fine.
Nowadays 90% of the "Sponsored" category that I see are scams and clickbait sites The most "innocent" of them are competitor ads trying to convert you from what you're actually searching for.
Unfortunately there are no incentives for Google to fix this. Apparently they make too much money out of it.
The most most innocent just duplicate the natural correct search result.
South Korean internet is dysfunctional enough that it's possible that Google is not showing the correct site at the top because the government site's designer helpfully decided to make the site "secure" by adding to robots.txt:
Source: Worked at Google Korea years ago. Back then, those things were common, and were commonly accepted as a solution to the problem "All your user's profiles are available in plain text, open to public, and searchable from Google!"You think this is bad? Try getting visa for Europe within the UK as a citizen of a 3rd world country. The official process is through a service such as VFS, which is the most painful experience I've had with any sort of service. There are very few appointments, all of which are blocked out by 3rd party bots, which means you need to pay a 3rd party twice as much to get any appointment. The VFS website is riddled with bot deterrents that actuall just deter humans, such as entering your password through a non-qwerty, randomised, on screen keyboard. If you call their helpline, you get charged for it. Everything is an upsell. You fill in a pdf form, print it out, give it to them and then they look at the printed document and type it back into their computer. There are literaly queues of people standing on the street outside their offices because they offer no seating, like the queues outside a club. Oh and you have to submit biometrics every single time, and therefore go in person for these apponitments that are impossible to get. I once had to submit my biometrics thrice in the same year for italian visa
Going through VFS seems like going through one of those expensive third parties instead of direct. And each EU country has a different visa service AFAIK, so the procedure will in fact vary depending on where you are going. (not saying the experience is not horrible).
Companies like VFS are basically what the embassies have outsourced work to
Setting aside the scam aspect, I find it depressing that places that used to be visa free for residents of certain countries have now instituted visa-but-not-a-visa with a fee across the board.
Visiting the US from the UK I used to have to fill in the green "Visa waiver" form, but it was free, short, and blanks were handed out on the flight in. Now I must file an ESTA ahead of time and pay a fee. Visitors to the EU and UK (and even between the EU and UK) will have similar advance paperwork.
It feels like a huge step backwards with very dubious advantages compared to the unwelcoming "fuck you pay me" feel of the encounter. There's nothing I like more when choosing a holiday destination than filling in a multi page bureaucrat-designed form and paying a fee for the pleasure.
A minor blip in the greater scheme of things, but it saddens me.
There's a strange (for someone from Eastern Europe) zone around public services where shady individual thrive: like buying vignettes - you may buy "directly" from the state (nemzetiutdij.hu, eznamka.sk, edalnice.cz) or by some middleman that brings nothing to the process but has a ~20% commission.
In the UK this happens with tax rebates. For the vast majority of people your tax is calculated by HMRC and taken out of your pay and if they make a mistake you just tell them and they will adjust your tax code so you pay less/more tax until it works out.
Some shady companies set themselves up as middlemen and pocket a large proportion of the rebate when you can do it yourself in minutes through an online portal.
In Germany there is also a strange zone where people bring sanity to government processes that have no business being this complicated.
I've never experienced any government process where paying a third party would have simplified things. I've also never heard of any third party offerings for that purpose. Could you share some examples?
Not sure about now, but last year your only way of getting a digital vignette for the Austrian highway that is valid “today” was via a third party (from outside Austria, I think).
Austrian ASFINAG would only sell you one that is valid in ~2 week at the earliest, since that’s the time you are guaranteed by law to return it. Not very handy if you are already on the road, and don’t want to stop to buy a physical vignette.
Sorry, should have specified that I'm looking for examples for Germany, as this was what the parent comment was talking about.
It generally means someone translating your information to the format the government employees expect, because each attempt costs multiple weeks of waiting. Basically, if there is a 6-week response time, you want to get it right on the first try.
In other cases, you pay people to save yourself the hassle of fighting for an appointment slot, and to save a trip across town in the middle of a work day. These fixers become the somewhat digital layer to a famously analog bureaucracy.
I've never had this issue with any government communication in Germany. Also, all appointments I need can be booked online, so I never had to pay someone for them (wouldn't even come to my mind). Maybe it's more of an issue for particular cities?
Is it safe to assume that you were born in Germany? The system is a lot less friendly to newcomers who have to do everything at once. It's full of catch 22 situations.
That aside, Germany is a federation and every state, city, office and employee adds a layer of variance for a given process.
In Greece, traditionally, we tend to consider Germany as the almost ultimate place in regards to reliability, efficiency, etc. It's a bit soothing to discover that almost everywhere everybody has the same issues (the difference in magnitude matters, of course)
It's a myth. Germans are methodical and risk-averse, but definitely not efficient. Things to get stuck at the precise point in time when they were over-engineered, and never move from there.
As a result, German bureaucracy tends to rely solely on paper and in-person appointments. With every state, every city, every office and every employee having their own interpretation of a procesd, you get an unpredictable, opaque, drawn out process that drives people mad.
There is a famous Asterix and Obelix scene about an office that drives people mad with bureaucracy. The protagonists are hunting for the Pass A38. This scene is better known in German than in its original French for a reason.
I think its overgeneralizing, but mostly accurate to say that the human-free constructs built by the Germans are quite efficient, but the human processes, systems, and interactions by which they get to these other results are byzantine at best, Kafkaesque at worst.
Perhaps the two are even related. American companies will reach 3 9's of reliability for a device, call it sufficient, and ship a product. German companies will be engaged with not only internal stakeholders, but also various levels of government for weeks to months just to come to an agreement about what the acceptable threshold is (it's the highest asked for by the combined pool of stakeholders), and 18 months after the Americans hit the market, you'll have a wristwatch with 7 9's of reliability that costs 3x as much as the American one.
These times are long gone. Not only with government efficiency, but the transition to digital services, railroad services, you name it. And yet people voted for a 68 year old Blackrock manager without any kind of governmental expertise on any level as their new saviour.
Yeah these days the masters of officiencynard probably Japan.
Nowadays that's actually Switzerland (at least I hear great things about Zurich, except the cost of living).
I've, in turn, heard much praise for how Estonia is doing it.
efficiency
Having lived in Germany for five years, this is a total myth. The German administration is a tire fire, I mean a filing cabinet fire. First lesson is: learn to wait. Have to do things at the municipality or the Finanzamt? Prepare to reserve 1-2 hours of your day, because you will have to wait a lot. And then the administration is pretty chaotic because (for historical reasons) they do not want to link administrations. Then they do random things like accidentally changing your and your partner's tax brackets in the middle of the year. My wife (who is German) chased them until they would fix it and they had no clue how it happened. Other foreign colleagues often had similar issues.
The same is true by the way with non-government stuff like medical care. Have an appointment with your GP or a medical specialist? Great, the appointment only means that you have to be there at a certain time. They will let you wait an hour or two without any remorse (what's the point of an appointment)?
Nothing is efficient in Germany. Reliability is also a meme at this point. Even 10 years ago, about 1/4-1/2 of the ICE trains I took would have a serious delay (which usually ended being a 2-3 hour delay if you have to cross a border). We just came back from vacation in Germany (it continues to be a beautiful country with nice people) with our electric car. The charging infrastructure is deplorable. Not only they have only a small number of chargers available (even a lot of highway stops only have two chargers), so impossible to charge on a busy day. But not only that, a lot of chargers are broken and nobody really cares for fixing them.
Sorry for the rant. tl;dr: Germany is not efficient and not reliable.
This. German bureaucracy is a nightmare, especially if German is not your first language.
German health system is a mess, but mainly because Germans are (probably rightly) suspicious of having electronic health records.
My favourite anecdote regarding German EV chargers - I was trying to charge at a motorway stop couple years back, and the stupid charger needs an app, ok, got the app. And it's even in English, success! But.....when I try to add a payment card it says the billing address has to be in Germany. Ok, I'm determined so I ring their helpline.....only to be told it's open Monday to Saturday 9am till 4pm(it was Sunday).
Honestly never seen this issue in any other EU country.
Very true, if only more sanity was brought.
I'm doing my best! I think I have made Berlin's bureaucracy a lot more approachable, but there's only so much you can do as a single person without official backing.
Or if spun around, it's incredible what can be done by a single motivated person, and sad that the entire bureaucratic apparatus is incapable of doing it.
Germany is special.
In Spain it's the same thing but for appointments for government services.
In Germany, we had a private company that offered a service no one needed to pay the household bill on public broadcasting.
If their SEO ranking beats the official site, they could confuse the hell out of people. (And I am told people do not use uBlock or Pihole everywhere, so paid ads would work, too.)
They seem to leave the market, perhaps due to being sued they cannot make a profit: https://www.verbraucherzentrale-niedersachsen.de/themen/kauf...
> In Germany, we had a private company that offered a service no one needed to pay the household bill on public broadcasting.
At first I thought you were talking about GEZ itself.
Do people not use their own government as the entry point for visa applications? I just go to the website of the foreign office of my government which has a list of the requirements to enter every country in the world and what needs to be done and how. I have never started with a google search.
Scam sites for visas rank higher on a google search than the legit ones.
I wonder how much of a bright line can be drawn to distinguish these sites that charge to “help” you through some governmental process vs like TurboTax.
My industry (immigration to Germany) has many of these services. The line is easy to draw: the cost should be proportional to the convenience it creates.
Basically, is it a service or an unlicensed toll booth?
I wonder how many people have paid for International Drivers Permits from scam websites. In the US these are only issued by AAA, and until recently they were only available by mail or in person, creating an opening for grifters to sell print-at-home PDFs.
(The concept seems outdated, and I've successfully rented cars abroad without an IDP at all. Also, isn't it weird that authority to issue these is delegated to AAA, and them only?)
IDPs are still very much useful and needed - short of the world agreeing on a single standard for what a driving license should look like, they're a lot more practical than expecting everyone to understand 192 different formats (and a few crazy countries like the USA even issue dozens of different license formats within the country). Delegating it to some random driving-related third party is slightly weird but not that weird (in my country they're done by the Post Office, which is arguably weirder, but I guess they also handle passport applications so it makes a certain amount of sense from that perspective).
There are many countries where just having a standard-ish license with English is perfectly fine. I think last time we had a thread on this topic someone mentioned a few countries where that wasn't true but most of Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, (edit: UK), and a bunch of other countries will just take your local plastic license as long as it has English on it.
I have never driven a car outside of my own country, and I always wondered how they even allow you to drive a car without getting re-trained in a country where the driving system is so different than where you obtained your license (I'm looking at you, Commonwealth countries). Isn't it difficult to adapt to left-side driving while having used to right-side? It surely needs a little bit of adapting as a pedestrian.
I've driven in many countries including some pretty crazy ones and ones that drive on the wrong side of the road. You adjust/adapt ;) Every now and then though I still turned on the windshield wipers instead of signalling... And when the roads were completely empty you sometimes don't think and almost turn into the wrong lane... And roundabouts are also fun, like driving in Paris with their crazy multi-lane roundabouts.
The funny thing is e.g. in Canada, if you move there from certain countries, you can drive for 6 months on your foreign license, but then you have to take a road test to get a Canadian license!
> The funny thing is e.g. in Canada, if you move there from certain countries, you can drive for 6 months on your foreign license, but then you have to take a road test to get a Canadian license!
That's pretty normal, a lot of countries do something similar. They want to permit tourists and people on temporary work assignments to drive, but if you're actually moving to Canada for the long term they expect you to take a proper test.
Contrary to the sibling commenters, I found this pretty tricky to do; I was always too close to the curb or the lane marker, I lost my natural sense of where my car was positioned on the road. I have the same general surprise that you can just use a US license to drive in Europe --- but you can. The IDP seems pretty silly, especially knowing what little it takes to pick one up.
You could certainly question the wisdom of allowing short-term foreign visitors to drive on their foreign licenses, but taking that policy decision as a given the IDP is a reasonable implementation of it (even if I suspect its main function is to attach a fraud penalty to the "Prawo Jazdy" wheeze). Maybe something akin to the machine-readable passport code would be an improvement, but considering how long the likes of Real ID adoption have taken and that the IDP system isn't particularly broken, I can see why that wouldn't be prioritised.
> Isn't it difficult to adapt to left-side driving while having used to right-side?
You get used to it after a few minutes. It takes a bit more concentration, especially when turning out of one-way streets, but it's otherwise fine.
There are mutual recognition agreements between many pairs of countries. The UK, for example, will allow you to directly exchange a licence from an EU or EEA, a British Crown Dependency, or a 'designated country' (Andorra, Australia, Barbados, British Virgin Islands, Canada, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Faroe Islands, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Japan, Moldova, Monaco, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Republic of North Macedonia, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates and Zimbabwe) for a British licence with no need for a retest. Most of those countries drive on the 'wrong' side of the road.
The hardest part of learning to drive on the left is not turning on your windshield wipers every time you turn a corner.
Really though, the actual driving part is pretty easy to pick up. You get accustommed to it quickly. You're more likely to have problems crossing the street on foot (you'll look the wrong way for traffic) than driving.
> The hardest part of learning to drive on the left is not turning on your windshield wipers every time you turn a corner.
This is something to learn the very first time when getting into a (new/unfamiliar) car before getting the vehicle moving.
Come to India and drive a few cars from different brands. [1] The rule is to drive on the left side of the road (so the driver is on the right side of the vehicle). But the sticks/levers to turn on the windshield wiper may be on the right side of the steering wheel or on the left side (and vice versa for the turn indicator sticks/levers), depending on the manufacturer. If you don’t check it in advance, you may end up wiping the windshield when you want to signal a turn or end up signaling a turn when you want to get water off the windshield.
[1]: Actually, it’s not recommended for foreigners to attempt to drive in India. The traffic is chaotic and one needs a different way of thinking to drive.
Accidentally turning on the wipers was definitely #1 for me. A close second was nearly turning the wrong way in roundabouts. I’m not sure why regular box turns were easy to mentally flip but roundabouts just broke my brain instead.
Realistically the answer is probably that countries accept a certain risk of collisions in the interest of good international relations and the resulting tourism and business. They might also trust visitors to pay more attention. There are rules that attempt to restrict the abuse of IDPs (e.g. available for a max period of 1 year and only available in your home country, and in some countries it may be illegal for people on longer-term visa statuses to use them), but it's all tradeoffs. I can imagine that e.g. Uber might be lobbying politicians to make them less widely available, and they may succeed.
An IDP isn't a driving licence; it's an internationally-agreed and -recognised document that asserts that 'this other document I have is a driving licence.' I think the main value of an IDP is that it avoids this sort of situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DQBc3eFUlU
Although it wouldn't have helped in that situation, as the Polish don't need IDPs in Ireland.
The point is that if the Polish did need IDPs in Ireland then it would. Very few things help when you don't use them.
I don't think it would, because this happened because of the old format paper Irish driver's licenses which had the driver's name in the top left hand corner, where prawo jazdy was written on the polish plastic cards.
But anyway, IDPs will never be required in the EU.
There are many countries outside of the Anglosphere though…
This scam is everywhere: set up a website to "middleman" yourself into the application process of any online permit/certificate/authorization, make it look as similar to an official website as possible, game up your way to first place in search results through SEO, profit.
It's not even illegal in many places. There are still a ton of legitimate lawyery/agency business outlets that do the same in physical form: They just complete forms for a hefty sum.
Sometimes they would also submit the forms / get the response back for you, which could be a real service in places where normally you would wait for a couple hours in a governmental office just to submit a form.
Isn't this abuse of the chargeback system? I was under the impression that chargebacks were for resolving otherwise unresolvable conflicts between the buyer and seller. Here the buyer didn't even attempt to get a refund from the seller before the chargeback.
If it was, the merchant could dispute the chargeback. It is not a one-sided process. They did not even try because I assume they knew they would lose the dispute.
In principle yeah, it’s an abuse of charge back. In practice, Visa, MC, and Amex will just refund you without even asking any question.
I wonder if that's an American thing, every time I tried to do a chargeback here in the UK on a credit card my bank said they have to investigate first, give the seller an opportunity to respond, and only if that fails they will refund me after 60 days. While everything I see online suggests that Americans can pretty much do an at-will chargeback for any reason with instantaneous effect?
Yeah, pretty much.
I used to work for an online retailer that sold high-ticket machinery parts. It wasn’t uncommon for us to face chargebacks on orders worth around $20,000. Eventually, we had to get chargeback insurance, because the only way to contest a chargeback was through a mercantile court.
UK now charges £16 for Australians.
please take a look at what they charge people who have to go through a whole visa process (for me, it starts at 179 USD to _apply_ (which may be rejected))
excluding all the time i'd have to spend and documents I'd have to collect