We should really do something about this issue, where so few companies (arguably, a single one) hold so much power over the most fundamental technology of the era.
I know it's easier said than done, especially when taking the scale of the requests into account, but the alternative has, does, and will continue to do serious harm to the many people and businesses caught in this wide, automated net.
Narrator: but it was only ever to get worse
Without a shift in incentives, its unlikely the outlook will improve. Unless the organisations affected (and those vulnerable) can organise and exert enough pressure for google to notice and adjust course, we're probably going to be stuck like this -or worse- for a long time.
The interesting things about predictable paths is that at the start there are a LOT of them, then over time there becomes just one of them. I don't see that this path was any more predictable at the start than any other.
Where where!?
Here here!
The counter argument to transparency will be that it provides too much information to those who aim to build phishing sites not blocked by the filter.
That said, we’ve experienced systems in which obfuscation wins out over transparency and it would be nice to tackle the challenges of transparency.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage
1: https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-it-really-sucks-to...
But it's a lot cheaper to pay for a few really expensive programmers to make a just-good-enough AI than to pay for thousands of human moderators. So we end up with a stupid computer creating tonnes of human misery all for the sake of FAANG's already fat profit margins.
I would think the attackers are using automation also, to spam attacks as in other areas of fraud. It can only be a battle of AI ultimately.
I don't want to blame this entirely on the big companies, though. Also the people want and expect "free" things on the internet. This is how we ended up like this.
Businesses become safer, but more regular people will get phished.
It'a not the role of Google to disallow phishing sites (as a browser) just like it's not the role of the ISP.
Make it hookable so people can chose their own phising protection service.
You just don't want to give control over the blocking blacklist/whitelist to a single entity, even less so to a huge powerful one, possibly in a country other than your own (which e.g. forces their foreign policy dictums to your blacklist), and even less so the one that already makes your browser, that should be a totally neutral conduit.
But also, it would leave the people most vulnerable to phishing unprotected, namely those not tech-savvy enough to install a phishing protection service. Most internet users don't even have ad-blockers.
Chrome lets you override and proceed to the site. The problem for the small business is that a large fraction of their customers see the scary red warning page.
Phishing protection is mostly needed for people who have no clear concept of phishing or technicalities. They just want to do things on the internet, like social media, they don't care about things behind the scenes, that's boring uncool nerd stuff.
IMHO yes. It's too much power for one company to wield. And especially a company with such questionable morals as Google. This cure is worse than the disease.
But maybe not do it by default on browser-level.
But if you do, then there really needs to be ways to combat wrong decisions in a timely manner.
Most of the time I run into blocked sites they seem to be blocked because of copyright infringement, not phishing. The only phishing sites I've seen in the last year or so are custom tailored. For example, I had to deal with a compromised MS365 account last year where the bad actor spun up a custom phishing site using the logo, signature, etc. of the victim.
So IMHO the intentions are no longer pure plus the effect is diminished and being worked around.
Make it easy and affordable to submit legal complaints for tech misbehavior and make the penalties hurt.
This is a great approach, if your goal is to optimize for increasing the amount of dangerous crap on the web. But, eh, that's surely worth it, because the profitability of startups is more important then little things like the security of the average netizen...
[1] Even if you make the operators liable [2], in practice, you'll never be able to collect from most of them. Whereas the blacklist curators are a singular, convenient target...
[2] If you can demonstrate how the operators of compromised websites can be held liable for all the harm they cause, I will happily agree that we should do away with blacklists. Unfortunately, the technical and legislative solutions for this are much worse than the disease you are trying to treat.
According to Google's most recent transparency report[1], as of December 20th of last year they were blocking around 27,000 malware distribution sites and a little over 2,000,000 phishing sites.
In your view, would turning off those blacklists and allowing those >2,000,000 sites to become functional again count as a "slight" increase?
(edit: That's a real question, incidentally, not a disagreement or an attempt at a 'zing'; I have no knowledge in this area but went to look up the numbers, and am curious whether 2,000,000 is truly a vanishingly small amount, relative to everything else that's out there that's not already on the list)
[1]: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/overview
I mean if we could trust Google (or anybody else of that kind) to have blacklist strictly limited to reasonable definition of malware and phishing, and knew that usage of such list if strictly voluntary under control of the user, it would be an acceptable, if decidedly imperfect, remedy. But we know we can't trust any of this, even if whoever works on this at Google right now are sincerely ironclad committed to never any mission creep and abuse happen, once the means exist, these people can always be replaced with others that would use it to fight "misinformation", or "incitement", or "blasphemy", or whatever it is in fashion to fight this week. There's no mechanism that ensures it won't be abused, and abuse is very easy once the system is deployed.
Moreover, we (as, people not in control of Google's decisions) have absolutely no means to prevent any abuse of this, since Google owns the whole setup and we have no voice in their decision making process. Given that, it seems to be prudent to make all effort to reject it while we still can. Otherwise next time you'd want to make a site questioning Google's decisions about the malware list, nobody would be able to read it because it'd be marked as a malware site.
There's no "report as false-positive" button at Google, so these reports likely have a lot of false positives in them...
Prior to that it was those that controlled the printing presses.
...
History continues to repeat itself.