Time to Downsize Google?

Maybe a spate of Google badware warnings is correct, but there are suspicious factors.

The Portland Tribune site is listed as dangerous. These screenshots were taken September 15th.

But, the info on the "black listing" says the report came in on September 16th.


Then the NW Republican website came up as dangerous this morning in Google Chrome (but not in Firefox).

Because it had links to rpc.blogrolling.com.

Here's a short discussion about Google's possible erroneous badware labeling.

The Weekly Standard just had a short piece on Google's strange map problems that happened to coincide with a major political/social event that Google's founders don't favor.

And, of course, there is Google's mistaken gathering of personal information in their street mapping effort in dozens of countries.

"Google said during a review it found it had "been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open networks".

"The admission will increase concerns about potential privacy breaches.

"These snippets could include parts of an email, text or photograph or even the website someone may be viewing."
[emphasis added]

A mistake? Germany's federal commissioner for data protection and freedom of information doesn't think so:

"'So everything was a mistake, a software bug! The data was collected and stored without the authorisation of the project's managers
or even the company's managers. If go along with this story, this means the software was used without having been properly tested beforehand,' [Peter Schaar] says.

"'It acquired billions of records unintentionally, without anyone in the company noticing, not even Google's internal data protection officials, who were still defending the company's practices two weeks ago.'"

Google seems to have too much power and insufficient capacity (or will) to make sure it is responsibly used. Google CEO Eric Schmidt famously declared:

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

Time to downsize Google?