Internet Powerhouses Team Up To Stop ‘Badware’
AOL, Google, Facebook, and Twitter may not always get along but they are now working together to stop malicious ads, malware gateways, scam ads and links to counterfeit goods sales.
The partnership will be helped along by nonprofit agency StopBadware, a 6-year-old agency which has compiled a list of unsafe “bad ware” links that should be avoided.
Speaking about the initiative Google’s global public police manager Eric David revealed:
“No individual business or law enforcement agency can single-handedly eliminate these bad actors from the entire web.”
Google is no stranger to “badware” after the company spent 2011 shutting down more than 130 million ads while ending their relationship with 800,000 advertisers who violated the company’s safe surfing terms of service (TOS).
Known as the Ads Integrity Alliance the company’s will work towards a set of shared goals that will ultimately make it safer for internet users to surf the web with less fear of data theft and other illegal activities.
1. Develop and share definitions, industry policy recommendations and best practices.
2. Serve as a platform for sharing information about bad actors.
3. Share relevant trends with policymakers and law enforcement agencies
StopBadware which will overlook the partnership was started as a project of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society in 2006, the non-profit organization than launched in 2012.
Google, Facebook, Twitter and AOL are not the only partners involved in this project, already onboard with StopBadware were Paypal, Verisign, Qualys and Verizon.
If all goes as planned most users will not even realize changes have been made to the links they see and the sites they browse, they will simply be provided with safer web surfing thanks to an ever-growing extensive list of bad neighbors those company’s can protect them against.
