Comment by koalaman
5 years ago
I do agree that there's room for improvement. There's always room for improvement, but there are also limits to the transparency one should provide for an anti-abuse system. It's difficult for anybody except for an expert in this area to say what would be a safe and satisfactory way to expose appeal and remediation for false positives. In the example from the story it looks like the turn around time was just an hour for your case, which seems rather good. The fact that not all consumers of this data were as responsive looks out of Google's control, and should be taken up with those companies.
I don't agree with the premise of your last question. It's not Google's responsibility to protect the internet and provide a free anti-abuse database for other browser vendors, and yet Google does do this at significant cost. The fact that they don't do it perfectly is not a rationale for killing it or providing it with infinite resources.
> It's not Google's responsibility to protect the internet and provide a free anti-abuse database for other browser vendors, and yet Google does do this at significant cost. The fact that they don't do it perfectly is not a rationale for killing it or providing it with infinite resources.
I think that's a naive perspective. Google did not create the database to be nice to other vendors, and it also did not make it available to them for that purpose.
An Internet-wide blacklist represents strategic leverage over competitors (or maybe even dissonant voices, should the need arise) and an massive source of data collection probe points. These facts were certainly brought up internally and deemed worth the risk when the massive legal liability of this product was assessed.
Therefore, because of the pervasiveness of this system, it needs to be handled responsibly. They are not doing anyone a favor by making sure it functions correctly. Google is well aware of this, because they don't need regulators and lawmakers gaining yet another excuse to try and dismantle them.