Earlier this year, Google Chrome gained an ad blocker governed by standards from the Coalition for Better Ads. It builds on other work to combat abusive experiences on the web. Chrome is now working on additional protections that will remove ads entirely from sites that are persistently home to abusive user experiences.
Last year’s anti-abuse efforts targeted unintended redirects from various sources and links to third-party websites disguised as play buttons or site controls. Despite these measures in Chrome 68, Google still found that the protections did not go far enough.
However, we’ve learned since then that this approach did not go far enough. In fact, more than half of these abusive experiences are not blocked by our current set of protections, and nearly all involve harmful or misleading ads.
These bad experiences are still prevalent and often take the form of “harmful or misleading” advertising used by scammers as part of phishing schemes to steal personal information. Namely, the ads appear as fake warnings meant to look as if they originated from your operating system, as well as “close” buttons that don’t actually exit or remove an offending ad.
Fake Messages
Ads or other elements that resemble chat apps, warnings, system dialogs, or other notifications that lead to an ad or landing page when clicked.
To combat this, Chrome 71 will “remove all ads on the small number of sites with persistent abusive experiences.” Google notes that site owners can visit the Google Search Console to see if they will be affected by Chrome’s built-in filtering capabilities.
The Abusive Experiences Report will note if a managed site contains any of the bad experiences mentioned above, with 30 days provided to address them before Chrome begins removing ads from that domain.
Chrome 71 is currently in the beta channel and will begin rolling out to all platforms in early December.
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