What does it look like when a hardware and software company descends into an obsession with recurring services revenue to please its shareholders? Look no further than Apple, who has turned its Apple News service into a vehicle for scam ads.
These fake “going out of business ads” have been around for a few years, and even the US Better Business Bureau warns about them, as they take peoples’ money then shut down. Does Apple care? Does Taboola care? Does Apple care that Taboola serves ads like this? My guess: no, no, and no.
↫ Kirk McElhearn
While serving obvious scams to users is already bad enough, the real kicker is that even if you are a paying user of Apple News, you still get served ads, including the scams. Of course, massive corporations like Apple are free too just scam you, since they’re effectively immune from any legal consequences, so it’s unlikely the scamming will stop as long as it makes line go up.
On an entirely unrelated note, OSNews is entirely free of ads, so there’s no scams here. OSNews is fully funded by our readers through single donations on Ko-Fi or by becoming a Patreon.
The only people that believed that Apple was working and continues to work for the best interest of its users have always been Apple users. No one else. This isn’t a knock on Apple users. The same goes for Microsoft users, Google users, Facebook users, etal…
That is the reality of things. Your complaints will only be met with lawyer weasel words and gaslighting because you have near zero value in the grand scheme of things. Support the companies that respect you. Isn’t it about time?
Any opinions why are massive corporations effectively immune from legal consequences? They stay that way for decades, even when country presidents or the ruling political parties change. Looks like something deeper than national political, legal or financial systems?
We assume that the ads are always bought by someone with products to sell, but depending on the price buying 1000s of targeted impressions can be useful for scammers too.
I was giving over-the-shoulder instructions to a client once to download and run filezilla. I was kind of in auto-pilot mode not paying enough attention. I told the user to click on the download link and low and behold it was a google ad portraying itself as a download link. Fortunately AV caught the malware but it really highlights how easy it to be tricked. I’d like to consider myself sufficiently knowledgeable and perceptive to catch these things but I just wasn’t paying enough attention.
I find it bad practice to have ads on a download page, Thankfully this is no longer the case, there are tiny ads in the columns but not in the main content section.
[Usual reminder that the FBI recommends everyone run adblockers for their cybersecurity.](https://web.archive.org/web/20221222165346/https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221?=8324278624)