WTF Facebook (Part II)
Published: August 13, 2010
Author: David Rodnitzky
Once again, the Facebook ad team seems to be letting some, um, questionable ads through the approval process. Here’s one that I saw today. First, the ad itself – do you think this could be intended to confuse users as to whether this is a lead gen company or the government?
OK, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that the headline writer was just a bit over-zealous. Let’s move on to the landing page here:
So the URL is “CriminalJusticeDepartment.org.” Um, yeah, there’s definitely some misrepresentation going on here. Of course, not surprisingly, after filling out all of your personal information you get to the inevitable list of for-profit schools from which you can get criminal justice degrees (which is tangential at best to joining the CIA).
But lest we just conclude that this is simply false advertising to the nth degree, our friends at the CIA/Criminal Justice Department have one more surprise in store for us – that’s right, malware!
So let’s recap – representing themselves as both the CIA and the Criminal Justice Department *and* throwing some malware on users’ computers. Paging the Google Quality Score department – Facebook is now hiring!
