Comment by swsieber
8 years ago
You're right, I guess. (Disclaimer: Not affiliated with any company affected / involved)
But I still find it troubling. Is it their mess? No. Does it affect a lot of people negatively - yes. I expect Google to clean this up because they're decent human beings. It's troubling because it's not just CloudFare's mess at this point.
It reminds me of the humorous response to "Am I my brother's keeper?", which is "You're your brother's brother"
Google cleaning this up is going to take a ton of man-hours, which will cost a LOT of money. How much money is Google obligated to spend to help a competitor who fucked up? Are they supposed to just drop everything else and make this the top priority?
I don't see this as them as helping a competitor. The damage has been done (in terms of customer relations).
I view leaving up the cached copy of leaked data as being a jerk move - not towards CloudFare, but to anyone whose data was leaked.
This is an opportunity for Google to show what they do with rather sensitive data leaks - do they leave them up or scrub them?
Had damage from the leak been aleady done (to those whose data it was)? Probably. Even taking that into account, I think the Google search comes off as a jerk in this situation.
I feel like you are operating under the assumption that deleting this leaked data is trivial, that they just have to hit a delete button and the data is gone.
This is not the case; it is not obvious, trivial, or easy to delete the leaked data. It is not simple to find it all. This is not like they are being given a URL and being asked to clear the cached version of it; they are being asked to search through millions of pages for possibly leaked content.