Google, Meta, and TikTok filed separate federal lawsuits on November 4, challenging Assembly Bill 1709, which Governor Gavin Newsom signed in September.

The companies argue that the law, due to take effect in 2027, interferes with free speech, overrides parents’ decisions, and conflicts with federal protections for online platforms.

AB 1709 prohibits covered platforms from providing California users under 16 certain

“psychologically exploitative features intended to maximize engagement that foreseeably lead to compulsive use.”

The law specifically includes personalized “addictive feeds” and autoplay. It also allows the attorney general to define additional features through regulations.

It would not ban children from using the platforms. They can keep their accounts if the platform removes the restricted features. Otherwise, the platform must delete the account and associated personal information.

The law also requires age verification before providing the restricted features. The law doesn’t stop children from searching for videos, following creators, or communicating privately. It makes exceptions for certain search-based results, content that a user explicitly requests, and direct private messages, subject to conditions.

California’s argument is that harm is not limited to what children see. It can also arise from how a service encourages them to keep using it, through personalized recommendations and features such as autoplay.

The idea behind the law is straightforward: Instead of relying entirely on teenagers to recognize when to stop, require platforms to remove some of the mechanisms designed to keep them engaged.

The companies’ objections

The companies’ objections fall into several related categories.

Meta argues that deciding which posts to show, and how to arrange them, is protected editorial judgment under the First Amendment. Its complaint accuses California of attempting to appoint itself the

“editor, curator, and controller of online speech.”

TikTok makes a similar argument about its For You feed. It says selecting and arranging videos creates a curated product protected by free-speech rights, not merely a mechanism that the state can redesign at will.

Google likewise argues that YouTube’s recommendations help users find relevant, appropriate material among its vast collection of videos. It also defends autoplay as useful for watching content intended to be viewed in sequence.

The central disagreement is whether these are harmful product features that California can regulate, or editorial decisions protected by free-speech rights. California describes them as potentially harmful product design; the companies describe them as protected decisions about publishing speech.

The companies also raise parental control. Google says parents are best placed to decide what is appropriate for their families. TikTok points to its existing teen-account safeguards and Family Pairing controls, arguing that the law restricts free expression while taking decisions away from parents. Meta adds that personalized features can help deliver age-appropriate experiences.

The business model

There is also a commercial interest at stake: engagement. How often people return, how long they stay, and how much they interact all matter to the platforms’ businesses.

Meta’s annual report says it generates substantially all its revenue from advertising. It also says that changes to its content displays and product features can affect time spent, user engagement, and financial results. That doesn’t establish why the companies sued, but it helps explain why restrictions on recommendations and autoplay could have financial consequences.

If removing these features leads people to spend less time on a service, it could mean fewer opportunities to show ads. Compliance would also require product and operational changes, such as checking users’ ages and providing a different experience to those under 16.

Youth is the future. Big Tech is very much aware of this. Meta’s annual report identifies youth as an investment priority and describes attracting and retaining users as a competitive objective. Restrictions affecting how young people join and use a platform could affect its longer-term audience strategy, too.

What the future will bring

California is challenging an important part of the attention-based business model. Meta’s annual report warns investors that regulation affecting how it displays content or serves younger users could affect user growth, engagement, and financial results.

And then there’s the matter of age verification. The required age checks could affect adults as well as children: a service must verify users’ ages before providing the restricted features. Depending on how the checks work, this could involve sharing age-related information, raising privacy concerns and creating another opportunity for sensitive data to be exposed in a breach.

If it were up to me, platforms would stop designing for compulsive use, whatever the user’s age. Adults deserve a healthier online experience too. Applying those protections to everyone would also remove the need to check someone’s age before deciding whether they can use these features. Platforms might lose some advertising opportunities, but time spent online should not be the only measure of a successful service.

Scammers don’t need to hack you. They just need you to click once. 

Malwarebytes Identity Theft Protection catches suspicious activity before it becomes a problem.

A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for misleading users about privacy, setting a record penalty. Meta plans to appeal.

This week a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay the state $25 billion. The order follows a jury finding that the company deceived Facebook users about their privacy, and it’s the biggest fine ever imposed on Meta. State District Court Judge Francis J. Mathew wrote that Facebook’s deception was intentional and that executives consistently misled users about how the platform worked.

“Facebook promised users that they (the users) controlled their data. This was false,” he said, as reported by the Associated Press.

This is a case about promises, not about a breach. Jurors found in September that Meta committed over 43 million violations of New Mexico consumer protection laws by making misleading public statements about how it handled users’ personal data. The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a political consulting firm harvested Facebook data to build targeted political ads for the 2016 election.

New Mexico had asked the court to fine Meta between $35 billion and $40 billion, arguing that only a large penalty would push the company to change its behavior. Meta’s lawyers said the fine should not exceed $3.4 billion and argued that any higher amount would be unconstitutional. The jury found more than 43 million violations, including 2.1 million under specific claims. Each violation can carry a fine of up to $5,000.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said the ruling sends a clear warning to technology companies that they must follow the law. Under the state’s constitution, fines for consumer protection violations go toward education. However, the money may remain tied up while Meta appeals the decision.

Meta plans to appeal the $25 billion ruling. The company argues that the decision and the way New Mexico is enforcing consumer protection laws make it almost impossible to operate in the state. Meta’s chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, says the case is an attempt to restrict free speech and impose new rules on what people can say online. The company says it is confident it will win the appeal. Meta’s lawyers also argued that the state failed to prove that residents had actually seen the misleading statements or suffered harm as a result.

Meta is worth $1.8 trillion and brought in more than $200 billion in revenue last year, and its shares rose 2% after the announcement, with earnings due that day. A nonprofit director called $25 billion a drop in the bucket for Meta, though he said it shows people want accountability. Both can be true: the company says doing business in New Mexico is all but impossible, and Wall Street shrugged.

The history explains why the number is so large. Cambridge Analytica got data through a personality quiz app that around 300,000 people took, and the app also pulled data on their friends, building a dataset of 87 million profiles. Meta banned the app in 2015 and asked Cambridge Analytica to delete the data, and the firm shut down in May 2018. The company later agreed to pay $725 million in December 2022 to settle a class action over sharing with Cambridge Analytica, and the FTC fined it $5 billion in 2019, a fifth of today’s award.

New Mexico was not part of the $18 billion settlement Meta reached in August with almost all other US states and territories. The deal includes stronger child-safety measures and $459 million related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This is Meta’s second legal defeat in New Mexico in six months. In March, a jury ordered the company to pay $375 million for misleading users about children’s safety.

Meta’s appeal could reduce the $25 billion fine if a court lowers the number of violations. The case also sends a warning to companies: privacy promises have legal consequences. As the judge stated, Facebook told users they controlled their data, but this was not true.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Cambridge Analytica Scandal)

Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal may feel like very old news. But the consequences are still arriving, and the latest comes with a $25 billion price tag.

Reuters reports that a New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in civil penalties after a jury found that Facebook misled consumers about its data practices and its handling of hate speech and misinformation. Meta says it expects to win on appeal.

This case is about more than information ending up in the wrong hands. It concerns what Facebook told people about who could access their information, how much control users had, and how the company enforced its own rules.

What Facebook told its users

In September, jurors found that the company and its leadership made 26 misleading statements on data privacy, hate speech, and other subjects. For example, Mark Zuckerberg’s 2010 statement that:

“We do not share your personal information with people or services you don’t want.”

That assurance appeared in a statement the jury found misleading. The judge found that choosing who could see a Facebook post did not necessarily control what outside app developers could access. That access was governed by separate settings that many users did not know existed.

New Mexico’s attorney general filed the lawsuit in 2021, following revelations that Cambridge Analytica obtained personal information from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app.

But New Mexico’s case went beyond Cambridge Analytica.

The state challenged Facebook’s representations to consumers about its data practices and its efforts to address misinformation and hate speech. The case centered on misleading consumers under New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, the state’s consumer protection law.

The state argued that third parties had broad access to users’ information and that Facebook tolerated harmful content when doing so benefited its business. Meta disputed the allegations, denied selling users’ information, and said the state had taken statements out of context.

New Mexico’s Department of Justice says the jury found 43,899,725 violations of state law. That does not mean nearly 44 million individual New Mexicans had their data taken. The count reflected the estimated audience for each misleading statement, rather than the number of individual people affected.

State law allows penalties of up to $5,000 per violation. Judge Francis Mathew found that a penalty exceeding $219 billion was warranted under the law but reduced the amount to $25 billion.

The judge said earlier penalties had failed to stop Meta from misleading consumers, including a $5 billion FTC penalty in 2019.

The money is not earmarked for compensation payments to individual Facebook users. According to Attorney General Raúl Torrez, state law directs the penalties to New Mexico’s school system.

Meta’s chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, said the company is confident it will prevail on appeal and characterized the lawsuit as an attempt to impose “a tax on speech.” Meta has also argued that a multibillion-dollar penalty risks violating constitutional protections concerning due process and excessive fines.

How to stay safe on social media

The case illustrates why privacy is not just a matter of choosing who can see a post. In a separate 2019 case, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleged that Facebook had shared users’ information with third-party apps used by their friends, even when those users had chosen restrictive privacy settings.

A few precautions can help you limit what you share, although settings alone cannot guarantee privacy:

• Share selectively. Leave optional profile details blank, limit who can see your posts, and avoid publishing sensitive details such as your address or live location. Ask permission before posting information or photos involving other people.
• Check app permissions. Does a social media app really need your contacts, precise location, or entire photo library? Turn off unnecessary access in your device settings.
• Review tracking and advertising settings. Look for controls covering personalized ads, activity outside the platform, and data sharing. Restrict what you can, but don’t assume opting out of personalized ads stops all collection.
• Be selective about connected apps. Before connecting a quiz, game, or other service to your account, check what information it requests. Decline access that seems excessive for what the service does.
• Remember what “private” means. Restricting your audience helps control who sees your posts. It does not stop the platform itself from collecting or using information about your activity.

Scammers don’t need to hack you. They just need you to click once. 

Malwarebytes Identity Theft Protection catches suspicious activity before it becomes a problem.

Meta wants the right to scrape your website for AI training. If you have a business account, that includes you.

At the end of the month, Meta plans to change its commercial terms in a way that matters to every company advertising or selling through its platforms. The new language takes effect on October 30, 2026. It lets Meta collect content from websites associated with business customers and use it to train AI models or otherwise improve its products, according to The Register.

Meta defines “business customer” broadly. It includes anyone who uses ads or marketing messages, sells or lists products, develops apps, uses a product catalog, manages a Page, runs a Group for business purposes, or uses tools such as Ads Manager or Meta Business Suite. At least one million businesses already use Meta’s AI agents in WhatsApp and Messenger. Nieman Lab also points out that almost every news publisher has at least one Meta business account.

The contract clearly explains which tools Meta can use. By accepting the terms, you allow Meta, or anyone working on its behalf, to use automated tools such as web scrapers, bots, spiders and crawlers to access and index your websites, pages and URLs. These tools can also revisit your sites regularly to collect updates.

“You authorise us (or any entity acting on our behalf) to use automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers and user agents) and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyse, collect, retrieve or crawl the domains, web pages or URLs (and any content available through them) that are associated with your products or services, or that are made available through your or users’ use of Meta Company Products and services, and to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages or URLs.” states Meta’s commercial terms. “Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms.”

Then comes the use clause. The company may use any content from those domains to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain the integrity of its products, services and features. The contract lists scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers and user agents, which is a lot of ways to say visitor you didn’t invite.

The News/Media Alliance says there’s no way out. Business accounts have no option to opt out of the terms, and the only alternative is to stop using Meta’s products.

““Meta’s new commercial terms of use are outrageous and probably illegal. The company’s decision to withhold access to its audience unless businesses allow Meta to scrape content from their websites is an appalling, bad-faith policy, and a clear abuse of the company’s market power. It cannot be allowed to be implemented on October 30.” states Media Alliance. “The text is so far reaching that any business with intellectual property online and a Meta business account could have their copyrighted material taken from them.”

Danielle Coffey, President and CEO of the News/Media Alliance also pushed the point beyond news sites. Her questions were whether Taylor Swift’s Meta business account would give Meta access to copyrighted media on her website, and whether Shutterstock’s would let Meta scrape its images. The Alliance’s argument is that any business with intellectual property online and a Meta account could be affected, not just publishers.

There is also a problem with robots.txt. News reports say the social network giant plans to let businesses control how its crawlers access their websites through robots.txt files, but the contract makes no such promise. The law does not always require companies to follow these instructions, so businesses must rely on Meta to respect their preferences.

The company didn’t respond to The Register’s request for comment.

If you run a Meta business account, someone should read the terms before October 30 and check what your own robots.txt actually says.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, AI)

Meta says it has resolved an issue after some Ray-Ban Meta owners reported that their glasses recorded conversations without the “Hey Meta” wake phrase.

Users reported finding recordings and transcripts of conversations they did not knowingly save. Recording without anyone realizing raises privacy concerns for both the wearer and the people around them.

The complaints surfaced on Reddit, where one owner described unexpected recordings occurring with three pairs of glasses. The owner said the behavior started after a firmware update and occurred even with Respond without Hey Meta disabled. They also reported that the glasses’ internal notification light sometimes activated during normal conversation. Other commenters described similar unexplained activations.

As Android Authority reports, Meta says the problem has been fixed:

“This issue has been resolved. People can manage, review and delete voice logs of their interactions with Meta AI via settings at any time.”

What’s missing is a public explanation of what caused it, how many people were affected, and what happened to the audio captured.

This isn’t the first time we’ve reported on privacy concerns involving smart glasses. In June, we covered unreleased facial-recognition code found in Meta’s companion app. The code was not active, but the reporting raised concerns about how wearable cameras could eventually move from capturing people to identifying them without their knowledge.

What owners can do

According to the Reddit owner, Meta Support recommended disabling microphone and camera permissions, turning off Wear Detection, deleting voice history, and disabling automatic updates. Those steps would limit much of the gadget’s core functionality without explaining what went wrong.

Until Meta provides a fuller explanation, here are a few precautions that make sense if you wish to keep using your smart glasses:

• Review your voice history. Look for interactions you do not recognize and delete unwanted recordings or transcripts. Meta says users can manage these logs through Settings.
• Check your voice-activation settings. The owner reporting the issue said Respond without Hey Meta was already disabled, so do not treat that setting alone as a guarantee against unintended activation.
• Keep the glasses and companion app updated. Although the user associated the behavior with an update, that is not a good reason to permanently abandon updates that may contain security and privacy fixes.
• Always ask before recording other people. Their privacy matters even when your glasses are working exactly as intended.

Meta still owes users an explanation of what went wrong and what it has done to ensure it won’t happen again.

Browse like no one’s watching. 

Malwarebytes Privacy VPN encrypts your connection and never logs what you do, so the next story you read doesn’t have to feel personal. Try it free → 

A scam crackdown on West Africa scam centers by Meta, tech firms and police removed 3.7M accounts, led to 28 arrests and freed 117 victims.

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The post Meta, Tech Firms and Police Hit West Africa Scam Centers in Joint Operation That Led to 28 Arrests appeared first on Daily CyberSecurity.

Ofcom has opened a formal probe into whether Meta properly assessed safety risks before launching Instagram Instants under the UK Online Safety Act.

The post Meta Faces First Ofcom Probe Under Online Safety Act Over Instagram Instants appeared first on TechRepublic.

Meta Muse Gadgets is an open-source project that lets makers build Muse AI hardware, with ESP32 firmware, a Linux SDK, and a free dongle.

Related Posts:

• Apple Restricts Full Disk Access for macOS AI Agents
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• OpenAI AI Safety Whistleblower Warns of Culture Collapse

The post Meta Muse Gadgets: Open-Source Hardware for the Muse AI appeared first on Daily CyberSecurity.

Meta’s Muse AI shared a Facebook Marketplace seller’s pickup address and arranged a deal that ended with a buyer showing up unexpectedly.

The post Meta AI Shares Seller’s Address: Facebook Marketplace Buyer Shows Up at His Home appeared first on TechRepublic.

Meta Muse human concierge secretly routed AI phone calls to contractors, exposing users' private data. Meta paused the feature after a racist remark.

Related Posts:

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The post Meta Muse Secretly Used Humans for AI Phone Calls appeared first on Daily CyberSecurity.

Former deputy PM now involved in tech industry says many within sector are ‘winding themselves up into a lather’

Nick Clegg has dismissed fears over AI’s “godlike power to exterminate humanity”, calling it a sign that tech bosses are “breathing their own fumes”.

The former UK deputy prime minister said that tech bosses should focus on addressing known specific threats such as cybersecurity and bioweapons rather than the “slightly hand-wavy view that this technology is unavoidably going to develop some godlike power which is going to turn on us and exterminate humanity”.

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone to great lengths to hype the security of its new AI assistant, Muse, claiming it is “built from the ground up for privacy and security.” A zero-day vulnerability that gives locally run apps and terminal commands complete control of the agent raises serious doubts. Further raising questions, Amazon on Sunday began blocking Muse from its site.

Meta introduced Muse a few weeks ago. The assistant “books appointments, fills out forms and handles customer service,” “proactively takes tasks off your plate,” and can “make purchases, generate images, create documents, and connect with your favorite apps and services.” The macOS app (curiously, there’s no Windows version) also works with a user’s WhatsApp, email, calendar, and social media accounts. When a task requires a tool that doesn’t exist, Muse creates one on the fly.

Meta doth hype Muse security too much

Of course, for Muse to do any of these things, users must first give it access to their accounts. This includes authenticating the assistant to each service and, because the app runs on macOS, giving it permissions to a broad range of operating system-restricted device resources, like writing files to disk, accessing the mic and camera, and monitoring location and calendars. Apple has spent years developing these defenses to prevent installed apps or commands entered into the terminal from accessing these resources, clearly because the company considers them a security threat. Muse completely undoes these default measures.

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The post AI Agents, Foldables, Cyberthreats, and Chip Deals Define This Week in Tech appeared first on TechRepublic.

A malicious advertising campaign promoting a fake free TV-streaming service reached roughly 570,000 Meta users.

The researchers who discovered the campaign found that its streaming-themed ads were aimed at Spanish-speaking users, with most observed victims located in Spain. One Meta campaign ran from June 11 through July 3, 2026, and the same banners were also used to distribute the malware through TikTok.

The available data shows the ads’ reach, not the number of downloads or infections, but it demonstrates how quickly paid advertising can put a scam in front of a very large audience.

The ads promoted an Android banking Trojan and infostealer called StreamRat. It can monitor what’s on screen, capture information typed into apps, show convincing fake screens to steal usernames and passwords, and allow attackers to control the device remotely.

We often warn people not to click suspicious links in unexpected texts or emails. But malicious advertising is harder to recognize because it appears in the same feeds where people expect to find promotions, videos, and recommendations.

This campaign is a perfect demonstration of why “after-the-fact” ad checks are inadequate when it comes to protecting social media users. Attackers used familiar social media advertising and carefully tailored instructions to turn casual interest in free entertainment into a risky app installation.

How the attack worked

The ad led victims to a website posing as a streaming platform. The site checked whether a visitor was using Android. Non-Android visitors were simply prevented from downloading anything, while Android users were shown an app download option. This is a common way for scammers to concentrate their efforts on devices their malware can infect.

The site also identified whether someone had arrived through Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or a regular browser. It then displayed instructions suited to that situation, including steps to allow the browser to install apps from “unknown sources.” In other words, this was not a generic malicious download page: It was designed to coach people through the security warnings that would normally make them stop and think.

StreamRat is an Android banking Trojan and infostealer. It can monitor what’s on screen, capture information typed into apps, show convincing fake screens to collect usernames and passwords, and enable attackers to operate the device remotely. The researchers also found options to cover the screen with a black page or fake Android update screen. These can distract victims while criminals interact with the phone behind the scenes.

How to stay safe

While this campaign targeted Spanish-speaking people, primarily in Spain, the following guidelines can help anyone avoid similar attacks.

• Avoid installing Android apps from ads, direct-download websites, social media messages, sponsored search results, or links sent by strangers.
• Download apps through Google Play whenever possible, and check the developer’s name, reviews, and app history rather than relying on an ad.
• Before enabling installation from “unknown sources,” read our guide, Sideloading on Android: What it is, why it’s risky, and how to do it more safely.
• Be very cautious when an app asks for Accessibility access, screen-sharing permission, Device Admin privileges, or permission to become the default launcher. Permissions that don’t line up with the intended use of the app are very suspicious.
• Use an up-to-date, real-time anti-malware solution on all your devices.

What to do if you installed a suspicious app

If you installed a suspicious APK and granted it Accessibility access, disconnect the phone from Wi-Fi and mobile data. If possible, revoke the app’s Accessibility access and remove it. Use another device to change relevant passwords and contact your bank if you used banking apps on the infected phone. A factory reset may be necessary if you cannot confidently remove the infection.

Malwarebytes for Android detects the components of StreamRat as Android/Trojan.Agent.ACRAEEF8A36H36, Android/Trojan.Agent.ACR02DB0614H7, and Android/Trojan.Dropper.ACR9B7ECE83D1.

Scammers know more about you than you think. 

Malwarebytes Mobile Security protects you from phishing, scam texts, malicious sites, and more. With real-time AI-powered Scam Guard built right in. 

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WhatsApp is adding stronger two-step verification, multiple passkeys and more context for unknown callers as it expands protections against scams.

The post WhatsApp Just Added 3 New Ways to Protect Your Account appeared first on TechRepublic.

ICE warned employees against using Meta smart glasses on duty as DHS seeks $7.5 million to develop biometric-enabled prototypes for field agents.

The post ICE Warns Employees Against Meta Smart Glasses appeared first on TechRepublic.

Reports that uBlock Origin is stepping back from the never-ending effort to filter Facebook ads are a reminder that ad blocking is no longer only an argument about inconvenience, publishers, and lost advertising revenue.

It is also an issue of security.

For years, ad blockers have occupied an uncomfortable place in the web economy. Publishers and platforms rely on advertising to fund their services, while users install blockers to escape intrusive banners, autoplay videos, tracking scripts, and feeds that increasingly feel designed around monetization rather than the people using them.

That debate is usually framed as a contest between a platform’s right to make money and a user’s desire for a cleaner browsing experience. But it leaves out an important detail: Ads are not always merely ads.

Malwarebytes General Manager Mark Beare stated:

“While it’s easy to look at ad blockers solely as a way of hurting monetization for these businesses, the other thing that ad blockers are doing is blocking malicious and scam ads.”

Sometimes ads are scams. At other times, they lead to malicious sites. And often, they impersonate trusted brands, promise fictional government payments, promote fake investment opportunities, or send victims into private messaging channels where the fraud continues.

In those cases, an ad blocker is not simply removing something annoying. It’s removing a route into a scam.

The advantage lies with the platforms

The reported decision by uBlock Origin’s team to stop continually chasing changes to Facebook ads highlights a structural advantage held by large platforms.

An ad blocker generally works by identifying requests, scripts, page elements, and patterns associated with advertising or tracking. A platform that controls the entire delivery stack can alter those patterns: It can change element names, move content into new components, serve ads through first-party infrastructure, or make sponsored content look more like ordinary posts.

This creates a familiar cat and mouse game. Filter-list maintainers identify a new method, the platform changes its implementation, users receive an update, and then the cycle starts all over. Again and again.

It’s the difference in resources that matters. A major platform can deploy changes on an enormous scale and has dedicated teams working on its products, advertising systems, and infrastructure. Open-source filter maintainers and independent blocking tools do not have the same staffing, telemetry, or ability to anticipate upcoming changes in how ads are delivered or how the platform will modify its systems.

That does not mean platforms should be expected to design their products around every third-party extension. Nor does it mean every attempt to detect or resist blocking is malicious. Advertising funds a great deal of the online content and services people use every day.

Not every blocked ad is harmless

A platform’s ability to make ads harder to distinguish from ordinary content should come with a corresponding responsibility: Make sure the ads being delivered deserve the trust implied by that integration.

Internal Meta documents reviewed by Reuters showed that the company projected about 10% of its 2024 revenue, or $16 billion, would come from ads for scams and banned goods. Meta said the estimate was “rough and overly-inclusive,” and that the true figure was lower.

That is a clear mismatch with Meta’s advertising rules, which explicitly prohibit deceptive and misleading ads, including schemes intended to scam people. Meta said its ad-review system examines ads before they go live and can re-review them later, but Meta also acknowledges that an ad may begin delivering before it has been reviewed against every policy.

That time gap is important. Scam campaigns are built to exploit speed and scale. Fraudsters can test new creatives, swap landing pages, impersonate a brand or public figure, and adapt when enforcement catches up. Meta disputed Reuters’ characterization of its anti-fraud efforts.

This is not an argument that every ad on Facebook, Instagram, or another large platform is dangerous. Most are not. The problem is that users cannot reliably tell, at a glance, which ad is a legitimate offer and which one is an attempt to steal money, credentials, or personal data.

Better moderation of ads is better for everyone

Rather than treating every blocker as a threat to revenue, a more productive response to ad blocking is to make the advertising experience safer, less invasive, and more accountable.

That starts with focusing less on defeating filters and more on preventing harmful ads from being approved or reaching users in the first place.

Some practical priorities include:

• Verify advertisers more consistently, especially in high-risk categories such as financial services, cryptocurrency, health products, job offers, and government-benefit claims.
• Review not only the visible creative, but also the destination page, redirects, tracking behavior, and later changes to the advertiser’s site.
• Detect and act on coordinated impersonation campaigns quickly, rather than treating each fraudulent ad account as an isolated incident.
• Make it easy for users to report ads and give them useful feedback when action has been taken.
• Tackle ads before they can direct people into private messages, where scammers can continue the conversation outside public scrutiny.
• Treat repeat offenders, cloned campaigns, and accounts linked to known fraud infrastructure as a network problem, which is much more effective than moderating them one ad at a time.
• Give users meaningful controls over ad personalization, tracking, and the volume of ads they see.

Meta has policies against scams in place, continues to remove ads that violate those policies, and has announced additional anti-scam measures. Those are necessary steps. The question is whether they are sufficient for an environment where criminals are motivated, well-funded, and able to adapt rapidly.

No ad-review system will catch everything. Criminals will continue to use deception, compromised advertising accounts, and fast-changing infrastructure to get around automated checks.

That is why layered protection matters here as well.

Users should be able to choose tools that reduce tracking, block intrusive advertising, and stop access to known malicious sites. They should also be able to use browser protections, security software, and healthy skepticism when an ad promises easy money, a surprise refund, a miracle product, or a deal that seems too good to be true.

If ad blockers and the platforms that rely on advertising can find ways to work together, allowing security tools to intercept the malicious content their moderation systems miss, we can make the internet safer for everyone.

Stop threats before they can do any harm.

Malwarebytes Browser Guard blocks phishing pages and malicious sites automatically. Free, one click to install. Add it to your browser →

WhatsApp is testing an on-device Scam Alert feature that flags suspicious messages while keeping analysis local and preserving end-to-end encryption.

The post WhatsApp Begins Limited Test of AI Scam Alerts for Unknown Senders appeared first on TechRepublic.