Okay Geek Farm
Google is suing the fake pharmacies that spam us
Brandon Davenport
You know those fake companies (namely pharmacies) that spam us offers for Viagra? Yeah, we hate them too — but what you may find interesting is that their ads have been appearing in Gmail, inline with our regular email, for years. They show up to the far right of an email message, where the other related ads do, and since Google runs these ads, they are going to sue the pants off them.
So this morning we filed a civil lawsuit in federal court against advertisers we believe have deliberately broken our rules. Litigation of this kind should act as a serious deterrent to anyone thinking about circumventing our policies to advertise illegally on Google. As we identify additional bad actors, we will add them to the lawsuit. Rogue pharmacies are bad for our users, for legitimate online pharmacies and for the entire e-commerce industry—so we are going to keep investing time and money to stop these kinds of harmful practices — Michael Zwibelman, Google’s Litigation Counsel
We can easily tell this is for the sake of good publicity, because these ads don’t effect Google in any way, but nevertheless we are glad they are doing it. Most of us at T3ch H3lp don’t even bother to glance at the ads in our Gmail — but un-tech-savvy users could mistake these fake ads for illegitimate advertisements. Besides potential lawsuits against Google for having mis-leading ads in their mail service, Google is doing this to get a pat on the back — not to make themselves feel good.
