Legal Research

This Is What Happens When All Your Eggs Are In One Basket (Reprised)

Back in late November I blogged about how all those nifty Google services you love — Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and more — are tied to one email account. (Heck, I even had to have a Gmail account to activate my G1 Android phone.) If someone hacks your account, you lose your data — and worse — your privacy.

This past weekend we saw another example of how when Google sneezes, we all get sick. On Saturday morning, for about an hour, Google flagged every Web page, including itself, as malware. Google wouldn’t let you go directly to sites from the result page. It suggested that you visit StopBadware.org for more info, which quickly bogged down from the unexpected additional traffic. According to Google, the problem stemmed from “human error” when they updated their list of known harmful Web sites.

Blogger Om Malik said it best. This episode:

“shows that Google has become the single point of failure [my emphasis] in our digital lives, whether we like it or not. These problems … are not going to go away, as the company becomes bigger, offers more services and extends control on our digital lives.”

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on February 02, 2009 (boomark / email).