Comment by shadowgovt
5 years ago
They care, but the dominant policy in Google's calculus about what features should be released is "Don't let the exceptional case drown the average case." A legitimate SaaS providing business to customers might get caught by this. But the average case is it's catching intentional bad actors (or even unintentional bad actors that could harm the Chrome user), and Google isn't going to refrain from releasing the entire product because some businesses could get hit by false positives. They'd much rather release the service and then tune to minimize the false positives.
To my mind, one of the big questions about mega corporations in the internet service space is whether this criterion for determining what can be launched is sufficient. It's certainly not the only criterion possible---contrast the standard for us criminal trial, which attempts to evaluate "beyond a reasonable doubt" (i.e. tuned to be tolerant of false negatives in the hope of minimizing false positives). But Google's criterion is unlikely to change without outside influence, because on average, companies that use this criterion will get product to market faster than companies that play more conservatively.
Nah-- I think you've got it all wrong. The problem isn't the false positive/false negative ratio chosen.
The problem is that there's false positives with substantial harm caused to others and with little path left open to them by Google to fix them / add exceptions-- in the name of minimizing overhead.
Google gets all of the benefit of the feature in their product, and the cost of the negatives is an externality borne by someone else that they shrug off and do nothing to mitigate.
One solution, perhaps, could be to have some kind of turnaround requirement---a "habeas corpus" for customer service.
By itself, it won't solve the problem... The immediate reaction could be to address the requirement by resolving issues rapidly to "issue closed: no change." But it could be a piece of a bigger solution.