Closed Bug 393225 Opened 17 years ago Closed 17 years ago

Google tracked as pay per click

Categories

(Toolkit :: Safe Browsing, defect)

x86
Windows 2000
defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

()

RESOLVED INVALID

People

(Reporter: trojan_oo7, Assigned: tony)

References

()

Details

(Whiteboard: Google problem, invalid?)

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6

In the security option use Google to check to tell me if the site i visited is a suspected forgery is enabled and if i visit any site which has pay per click with Google then it is tracked by Google as an hit from their site. 

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Could only be verified with a website which has pay per click with google
2.
3.


Expected Results:  
This shouldn't happen.

Could only be verified with a website which has pay per click with google
I think most of us are completely ignorant of how Google's ad program works, could you elaborate a bit? The "Steps to Reproduce" section is really not an optional component of a bug.

The default anti-phishing setting is to periodically download a list. It sounds like you've chosen the non-default "ask Google for every site" option, correct?

I can imagine a couple different interpretations for "visit any site which has pay per click". Do you mean visiting the site that contains an ad, or visiting the target of the ad itself?

What do you mean "tracked as a hit from their site"? They're charging you for an extra hit? They're misattributing the source of the click and then not paying you for it?

Since the url lookups don't actually download any site content I don't see how it could possibly count as a click in either scenario. I think you need to take this up with whatever technical support Google provides for the pay per click program.

Tentatively reassigning to the anti-phishing feature, but I think this isn't our bug at all since we have no control over what Google does with the URL lookups or their advertising programs.
Assignee: nobody → tony
Component: Security → Phishing Protection
Whiteboard: Google problem, invalid?
The "look up every URL" option is not the default and is chosen by an extremely small percentage of people. In practice this is hopefully not much of an economic impact.
Everything Daniel says is correct.  When the phishing service is set to "Check by asking Google", it makes an extra request to Google's server.  At that point, Google's server does not try to load the site to be checked, mainly because that would be too slow.  Using that option should not result in an extra hit to the site being loaded.

Also, in Firefox 2, since the check happens 2 seconds after page load, the URL that's being checked would probably not be the click tracking URL.  It would be the final landing page that the user is redirected to.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 17 years ago
Resolution: --- → INVALID
Product: Firefox → Toolkit
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