Comment by remus
5 years ago
> I for one never appointed them the guardian of the walled internet.
On the other hand, lots of chrome users most likely do trust google to protect them from phishing sites. For those ~3 billion users a false positive on some SaaS they've never heard of is a small price to pay.
It's a tricky moral question as to what level of harm to businesses is an acceptable trade off for the security of those users.
The trade-off isn't between increased phishing vs. increased false positives. It's being able to get a human on the phone vs Google's profit margins. Break them up already.
I actually don't think this is that hard to fix though.
I'm a fan of google doing their best to protect people from scammers. The real issue here is no way to submit an escalated help request when they accidentally mess up. eg they could build a service where -- and I doubt scammers would play -- $100 (or even $1k) would escalate a help request with a 15 minute SLA. I run a business; we would have no problem paying an escalation fee.
I can already see the headlines on HN:
"How Google Runs a Pay-to-Play Protection Racket"
I mean, that's their whole business anyway, so...
Format your site to suit google, or they don't index it.
Add headers to your emails or google reduces deliverability.
Pay for clicks on your own company's name or google sells ads against the name of your company! They monetize navigation queries.
Run your site through amp and let google steal your traffic or google pushes your search rank down the page.
Let google steal answers to questions contained on your site and display them as answers w/o sending people to your site, or they deindex you (see tons of examples, but also genius).
Let google steal your carefully curated and expensive photographs for google shopping and use them for the item from other vendors or you can't list items in google shopping.
etc etc etc... it's nothing new. So we may as well encourage them to do a more helpful job of what they were going to do anyway.
This was the old Microsoft support model: opening a case cost $99(IIRC), but if the case was actually a MS bug/issue they’d waive the fee.
It might have started at $99 but it's much higher now. I think the last time I used it it was $299 but that was at least 2 decades ago. Fortunately it was their bug.