<story><title>Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup</title><url>https://gomox.medium.com/google-safe-browsing-can-kill-your-startup-7d73c474b98d</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>freedomben</author><text>After years of seeing developments like this, getting worse and worse, it fills me with rage to think about how clearly nobody in power at Google cares.&lt;p&gt;I naively used to think, &amp;quot;they probably don&amp;#x27;t realize what&amp;#x27;s happening and will fix it.&amp;quot;  I always try to give benefit of the doubt, especially having been on the other side so many times and seeing how 9 times out of 10 it&amp;#x27;s not malice, just incompetence, apathy, or hard priority choices based on economic constraints (the latter not likely a problem Google has though).&lt;p&gt;At this point however, I still don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s outright malice, but the doubling down on these horrific practices (algorithmically and opaquely destroying people) is so egregious that it doesn&amp;#x27;t really matter.  As far as I&amp;#x27;m concerned, Google is to be considered a hostile actor.  It&amp;#x27;s not possible to do business on the internet in any way without running into them, so &amp;quot;de-Googling&amp;quot; isn&amp;#x27;t an option.  Instead, I am going to personally (and advise my clients as well) to:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Consider Google as a malicious actor&amp;#x2F;threat in the InfoSec threat modeling that you do&lt;/i&gt;.  Actively have a mitigation strategy in place to minimize damage to your company should you become the target of their attack.&lt;p&gt;As with most security planning&amp;#x2F;analyzing&amp;#x2F;mitigation, you have to balance the concerns of the CIA Triad.  You can&amp;#x27;t just refuse Google altogether these days, but do NOT treat them as a friend or ally of your business, because they are most assuredly NOT.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m also considering AWS and Digital Ocean more in the same vein, although that&amp;#x27;s off topic on this thread.  (I use Linode now as their support is great and they don&amp;#x27;t just drop ban hammers and leave you scrambling to figure out what happened).&lt;p&gt;Edit:  Just to clarify (based on confusion in comments below), I am not saying Google is acting with malice (I don&amp;#x27;t believe they are personally).  I am just suggesting you treat it as such for purposes of threat modeling your business&amp;#x2F;application.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>at_a_remove</author><text>Jon Williams, circa 1987, wrote a story of a far-flung humanity&amp;#x27;s future in &amp;quot;Dinosaurs,&amp;quot; in which humans had been engineered into a variety of specialized forms to better serve humanity.  After nine million years of tweaking, most of them are not too bright but they are perfect at what they do.  Ambassador Drill is trying to prevent a newly discovered species, the Shar, from treading on the toes of humanity, because if the Shar do have even a &lt;i&gt;slight&lt;/i&gt; accidental conflict as the result of human terraforming ships wiping out Shar colonies because they just didn&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;notice&lt;/i&gt; them, the rather terrifyingly adapted military subspecies branches of humanity will utterly wipe out the Shar, as they have efficiently done with so many others, just as a reflex.  Ambassador Drill fears that negotations, despite his desire for peace, may not go well, because the terraforming ships will take a long time to receive information that the Shar are in fact sentient and billions of them ought not to be wiped out ...&lt;p&gt;Google, somehow, strikes me as this vision of humanity, but without an Ambassador Drill.  It simply lumbers forward, doing its thing.  It is to be modeled as a threat not because it is malign, but because it doesn&amp;#x27;t notice you &lt;i&gt;exist&lt;/i&gt; as it takes another step forward.  Threat modeling Lovecraft-style: entities that are alien and unlikely to single you out in particular, it&amp;#x27;s just what they &lt;i&gt;do&lt;/i&gt; is a problem.&lt;p&gt;Google&amp;#x27;s desire for scale, scale, scale, meant that interactions must be handled through The Algorithms.  I can imagine it still muttering &amp;quot;The algorithms said ...&amp;quot; as anti-trust measures reverse-Frankenstein it into hopefully more manageable pieces.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup</title><url>https://gomox.medium.com/google-safe-browsing-can-kill-your-startup-7d73c474b98d</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>freedomben</author><text>After years of seeing developments like this, getting worse and worse, it fills me with rage to think about how clearly nobody in power at Google cares.&lt;p&gt;I naively used to think, &amp;quot;they probably don&amp;#x27;t realize what&amp;#x27;s happening and will fix it.&amp;quot;  I always try to give benefit of the doubt, especially having been on the other side so many times and seeing how 9 times out of 10 it&amp;#x27;s not malice, just incompetence, apathy, or hard priority choices based on economic constraints (the latter not likely a problem Google has though).&lt;p&gt;At this point however, I still don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s outright malice, but the doubling down on these horrific practices (algorithmically and opaquely destroying people) is so egregious that it doesn&amp;#x27;t really matter.  As far as I&amp;#x27;m concerned, Google is to be considered a hostile actor.  It&amp;#x27;s not possible to do business on the internet in any way without running into them, so &amp;quot;de-Googling&amp;quot; isn&amp;#x27;t an option.  Instead, I am going to personally (and advise my clients as well) to:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Consider Google as a malicious actor&amp;#x2F;threat in the InfoSec threat modeling that you do&lt;/i&gt;.  Actively have a mitigation strategy in place to minimize damage to your company should you become the target of their attack.&lt;p&gt;As with most security planning&amp;#x2F;analyzing&amp;#x2F;mitigation, you have to balance the concerns of the CIA Triad.  You can&amp;#x27;t just refuse Google altogether these days, but do NOT treat them as a friend or ally of your business, because they are most assuredly NOT.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m also considering AWS and Digital Ocean more in the same vein, although that&amp;#x27;s off topic on this thread.  (I use Linode now as their support is great and they don&amp;#x27;t just drop ban hammers and leave you scrambling to figure out what happened).&lt;p&gt;Edit:  Just to clarify (based on confusion in comments below), I am not saying Google is acting with malice (I don&amp;#x27;t believe they are personally).  I am just suggesting you treat it as such for purposes of threat modeling your business&amp;#x2F;application.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gomox</author><text>Author here. I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s malice on their part, but their hammer is too big to be wielded so carelessly.</text></comment>