Compliance Suggestion for Google

A court in Paris, France has fined Google $65,000 because its search engine's autocomplete feature brings up the French word for "crook" when users type the name of insurance company Lyonnaise de Garantie, which brought a suit against Google.

(Source: Ars Technica - French court frowns on Google autocomplete, issues $65,000 fine)

First of all, that is not Google's choice. The autocomplete suggestions are based on what other people are searching. Thus, loads of French people already associate Lyonnaise de Garantie with "stealing their money".

Ok, so the French court is foolish, but Google still needs to comply with the ruling. It appears they did the obvious and now prevent their autocomplete from displaying any query containing both "Lyonnaise de Garantie" and "escroc" (the French word for crook). I have a better idea.

Google should

• prevent their autocomplete from displaying any query containing "Lyonnaise de Garantie",
• prevent their search engine from accepting any query containing "Lyonnaise de Garantie", and
• remove search results (from allowed queries) that contain any reference to "Lyonnaise de Garantie".

That way, Lyonnaise de Garantie can't be offended and sue Google for connecting their name with any negative connotation this world has to offer.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

Google Chrome Security: Less than Perfect

One of the major features touted when the Google Chrome web browser was introduce was its vastly improved security features. Their actions triggered other browsers to implement similar features, thereby improving the web for a much larger user base. However, their security is still not perfect.

My beef with Chrome is that it frequently prompts me that the file I am downloading might be dangerous for my computer. First off, I use Linux so even if I did download a "harmful file", it still cannot do anything that harmful unless I give it sudo rights...which I won't. But even if I was using Windows, I still think that this message appears too often.

The false positive rate for this feature is something like 50% but should be no larger than 5%. This message is supposed to be a security feature, but an alarm that is always going off is ignored.

I created a bug report for Chromium, the open source browser on which Google Chrome is based, about this issue. Hopefully people will see it, take it seriously, and provide a fix.