More than 1,000 Google employees are playing whack-a-mole with crummy and dangerous ads.
It’s no wonder that use of ad blockers is taking off, given that online ads are often annoying at best and illegal and dangerous at worst. Google today put some big numbers behind the bad-ad epidemic by reporting that, in the past year, it blocked more than 780 million of the very worst from getting through its ad network. Among the offenders: malware, links to data-stealing phishing sites, and those ads on mobile web browsers and apps that are almost impossible to not click on.