Google’s AdWords scheme has come under fire once more after the company was forced to remove unofficial sites selling London 2012 tickets to customers from its listings – in contravention of UK law.
The company, which blamed automatic selection and filtering in its advertising service for allowing the ads to run, admits to trousering the revenues generated by ads for illegal sites before they are detected or reported and taken down.
Only when ads are flagged by the filtering system does Google run a manual assessment to see if the ad conforms to policy and take it down if it does not.
In 2010, the company was forced to take down 94,000 ads in the UK alone. Meanwhile, last year, Google agreed to a $500m settlement for publishing ads for Canadian pharmacies selling illegal drugs to US customers.
A member of the public raised the alarm after responding to a sponsored ad for LiveOlympicTickets, only to discover that, after running into difficulties, the company was not an official reseller.
The buyer complained to Google, but received this reply: “While Google AdWords provides a platform for companies to advertise their services, we are not responsible for, nor are we able to monitor the actions of each company.” Only when contacted by the BBC, did Google remove the ad.
The Metropolitan Police is aware of LiveOlympicTickets and that the company is breaking the law, but said the company is registered overseas, and may be difficult to prosecute.
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