Tag Archives: URLs

For years, fraudsters have abused copyright takedown notices to dupe Google into removing websites from its search engine. But now the company is trying to fight back. 

On Monday, Google filed a lawsuit against two scammers based in Vietnam, who allegedly filed numerous false copyright takedowns with the company that targeted over 117,000 URLs. 

“These fraudulent claims resulted in removal of over 100,000 businesses’ websites, costing them millions of dollars and thousands of hours in lost employee time,” Google says in a blog post.

The alleged scammers, Nguyen Van Duc and Pham Van Thien, exploited a Google system that businesses and people can use to report copyright violations under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Google will then take down the URL hosting the…

Apple is taking aim at a tool the ad industry uses to monitor internet users by cracking down on “tracking parameters” from web links. 

Users encounter tracking parameters on URLs from an ad campaign circulating on social media or over email. The URL can contain special text to help marketers confirm that users are clicking their links through a marketing campaign. 

An example of a tracking parameter
(Credit: SEMRush)

However, tracking parameters can also help the ad industry profile a user’s web-browsing activity by indicating which sites they used to view and click on a marketing campaign. That privacy risk is causing Apple to take action. 

“Some websites add extra information to their URLs in order to track users across other websites,” the company says. “Now this…