Where's the evidence for that? The OP only mentions affiliate fraud and user data harvesting. Neither of that seem to benefit google. To my knowledge google doesn't run an affiliate network, and data harvesting likely helps rival ad networks rather than google.
Just because there's affiliate fraud happening doesn't mean google is benefiting. What evidence is there that google is benefiting? Are they even using google's affiliate network? Does google even have one?
I had no idea until I made an extension how messed up the ecosystem is.
Now I regularly get offered ~5 figures a month in recurring revenue to turn my extension into malware & I've see how blatant the abuses are by other extensions / the sellouts.
Is it that you don't believe these pieces of malware are generating fake engagement on Google's properties? Or that Clicks, Views & Users don't matter to Google?
>Is it that you don't believe these pieces of malware are generating fake engagement on Google's properties?
The extensions engage in affiliate fraud (ie. injecting affiliate code/cookies to links/sessions) and collect user data. That hardly counts as "engagement on Google's properties", which are mostly search ads and youtube. To my knowledge google doesn't have an affiliate network, so they're not getting anything there either.
You seem to imply that the extensions are engaging in ad fraud (eg. viewing/clicking on ads), but there's no evidence of that presented in the OP or in this comment section.
