Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup
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.<p>I naively used to think, &quot;they probably don&#x27;t realize what&#x27;s happening and will fix it.&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&#x27;s not malice, just incompetence, apathy, or hard priority choices based on economic constraints (the latter not likely a problem Google has though).<p>At this point however, I still don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s outright malice, but the doubling down on these horrific practices (algorithmically and opaquely destroying people) is so egregious that it doesn&#x27;t really matter.  As far as I&#x27;m concerned, Google is to be considered a hostile actor.  It&#x27;s not possible to do business on the internet in any way without running into them, so &quot;de-Googling&quot; isn&#x27;t an option.  Instead, I am going to personally (and advise my clients as well) to:<p><i>Consider Google as a malicious actor&#x2F;threat in the InfoSec threat modeling that you do</i>.  Actively have a mitigation strategy in place to minimize damage to your company should you become the target of their attack.<p>As with most security planning&#x2F;analyzing&#x2F;mitigation, you have to balance the concerns of the CIA Triad.  You can&#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.<p>I&#x27;m also considering AWS and Digital Ocean more in the same vein, although that&#x27;s off topic on this thread.  (I use Linode now as their support is great and they don&#x27;t just drop ban hammers and leave you scrambling to figure out what happened).<p>Edit:  Just to clarify (based on confusion in comments below), I am not saying Google is acting with malice (I don&#x27;t believe they are personally).  I am just suggesting you treat it as such for purposes of threat modeling your business&#x2F;application.