Google Chrome 71 will continue crackdown on sites containing abusive ads

Chrome 71, due out in December, will improve the browser's ability to block intrusive and misleading ads, Google announced today.

From Chrome 71, Google plans to better block all ads on websites that show what the company calls "abusive experiences." According to Google, this includes

• False messages – Ads or other items resembling chat apps, warnings, system dialogs or other notifications that lead to an ad or landing page when the user clicks on it.
• Unexpected click fields – Transparent backgrounds, non-visible page elements, or other non-clickable areas leading to an ad or landing page when the user clicks on it.
• Deceptive site behavior – Page features such as scroll bars, play buttons, "next" arrows, close buttons, or navigation links that lead to an ad or landing page when the user click on it.
• phishing – Ads or page elements that attempt to steal personal information or persuade your users to share it.
• Automatic redirection – Ads or page elements that automatically redirect the page without user intervention.
• Mouse pointer – Ads or page elements that look like a moving mouse pointer or clicking that tries to make a user interact with it.
• Malware or unwanted software – Ads or page elements that promote, host, or create links to malicious or unwanted software that can be installed on your users' computers.
• Ads with missing or misleading mark – Ads that promote or describe unidentified or fictitious businesses. Examples include advertisements or other items for which a company name, branding and logo are missing, even if a generic description is included.

Any website consistently featuring any of the "Abusive Experiences" above will be added to a blacklist and its ads deleted while loading in Chrome.

Website owners can view a section of the Google Search Console named Report Abuse Experiments to see if Google has found "abusive experiences" on their sites.

Once a site is added to this blacklist, Google grants website owners 30 days to remove "abusive experiences" from their pages before starting to delete all ads, including those that are not intrusive.

The "update" of Chrome 71 is not new. Google announced this mechanism in November 2017 and first deployed it with Chrome 64, released in January 2018.

The only change is that Google will apply its filtering of defective sites much more strictly than before.

"We've learned since this approach did not go far enough," said Vivek Sekhar, product manager at Google. "In fact, more than half of these abusive experiences are not blocked by our current set of protections and almost all involve harmful or misleading advertising."

Google said that only a "small number of sites" had persistent abusive experiences, which meant that it was not a widespread problem, but that it still had to be resolved because "these abusive ad experiences are used by fraudsters and methods of phishing information. "

If, for a variety of reasons, users want to disable Chrome's built-in ad blocking engine, they can access chrome: // settings / content / ads and disable it, even if we strongly advise against it.

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