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Google removes Utoopi Android App From Google Play
Google spokesperson Gina Scigliano has confirmed that Google has pulled the Utoopi Android App from Google Play, which offered “all the paid sex of your city geogargeted.” It was clearly aimed at young sex workers who could “alternate between their studies or work and their services as escorts in complete privacy.”
Unlike Apple, Google does not pre-approve apps it offers on Google Play, which is some cases can be a good thing. I wasn’t exactly overjoyed when Apple refused to approve the Drone+ App for their App Store, which sent users a pop-up notice “whenever a flying robots kills someone in one of America’s many undeclared wars.”
But sex advertizing is a very lucrative business, especially since Craigslist got out of the market. Craigslist sex ad revenues alone were projected to be $36 million for 2010, but they closed up shop after 14 members of the Gambino crime family were charged with selling girls between 15-19 through ads through the site.
Google repeatedly claims that they are using the most sophisticated technology to keep AdWords from being used to traffic underage kids, but if so, it seems like they could’ve extended it to identify an Android app that clearly had the words “paid sex,” “escort” and “students” written on the main page of the website.
Now that big players like Craigslist and The Village Voice have been pushed out of the sex advertising marketplace, the Utoopi episode has the appearance of Google not looking too hard in order to sweep up the business they left behind.
It’ll be interesting to see if the FBI targets organized crime for advertising underage sex workers on Google. Somehow I don’t see that happening.
9 Comments
Sweetie, we don’t spell ‘advertising’ with a zed. When I saw it earlier I thought it was a slipped fingernail, but it’s everywhere here. Do you use dictation software? Or are you ensuring against copyright infringement, like some dictionaries used to do with intentional writing errors? Borges wrote about the ancient scribal cult, which still exists, that makes sure nothing is ever printed without some scribal error embedded…
Oh, and feel free and unguilty about deleting my comment @1 and this one. They don’t have to stay here. ;-)
Thanks for pointing that out! I wouldn’t dream of deleting the comments. I LOVE that community-correction part of blogging.
Keeps you on your toes!
I thought of emailing a private, discreet message, but I figured ya wouldn’t get to it before Friday. ;-)
It must be synchronicity that you have decided to not only launch a tech with politics section, but that you also talk about tech with sex as an early article.
Gizmodo (a big tech site) has an article that brings out some of that lucrative sex advertising:
http://gizmodo.com/5941976/indentured-servitude-money-laundering-and-piles-of-money-the-crazy-secrets-of-internet-cam-girls-nsfw
That title is correct, the article is nsfw.
Unlike the iPhone, Android is an open platform, so even though Google Play has removed the app, it can still be distributed on the Internet and any user can install it.
Thanks for that!
I don’t have a problem with that, to the extent that what they’re doing is legal — unless Google is selling ads on it.
If what they’re doing is NOT legal — and I doubt it is — it’s a matter for law enforcement. It’s not an excuse to close the platform.
Congratulations on this development, Jane.
On a side note, was it noted here that the gay-friend-finder app Grindr reported an increase in activity in Tampa of almost 3-1/2 times during the RNC convention? (I didn’t have electricity that week thanks to Hurricane Isaac.)