Google To Retire 'Dark Web Report' Tool That Scanned for Leaked User Data (pcmag.com) 10
Google has decided to retire its free dark web monitoring tool, saying it wasn't as helpful as the company hoped. From a report: In a support page, Google announced the discontinuation of the "dark web report" tool, two years after offering it as a free perk to Gmail users before expanding it more broadly. The feature worked by scanning for your email addresses to determine whether they had appeared in data breaches, which often circulate on Dark Web marketplaces. The tool could then alert you about where the data was exposed, including any accompanying details such as dates of birth, addresses, and phone numbers.
Typical Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Another tool retired because they couldn't see a way to monetise it, obligatory xkcd reference [xkcd.com].
Re: (Score:2)
More likely they succeeded in monetizing it for a bit of jack under the table. That tool could easily have turned up gov. web sites or any of our dear Fascist company web sites (Oracle, Palantir, etc.)
Re: (Score:3)
More likely they succeeded in monetizing it for a bit of jack under the table. That tool could easily have turned up gov. web sites or any of our dear Fascist company web sites (Oracle, Palantir, etc.)
Whatever little money could have been made that way would absolutely not have been worth the PR risk of it leaking, especially since Google employees aren't good at keeping secrets.
Re:Typical Google (Score:4, Interesting)
Another tool retired because they couldn't see a way to monetise it, obligatory xkcd reference [xkcd.com].
Nah. I had some conversations with a guy who had worked on it and it really just didn't turn out to be very useful. It didn't find a lot of stuff that wasn't already in public leaked data databases, and when it did send information to users they were often confused about what to do. Worse, fake alert emails were being used for phishing. Shutting the program down probably won't impede that abuse much, but maybe a few people who get a phishing email who would have trusted it because they knew about and had signed up for the program will now not trust it because they know the program has been shut down.
Re: (Score:2)
It never made sense anyway (Score:1)
If Google crawls a particular site, how "dark" can it possibly be?
Re:It never made sense anyway (Score:4, Interesting)
For me, that "Dark Web" scan was giving me a ton of false positives. People were signing up for random shit using my e-mail address, and THOSE accounts were the ones being flagged as being breached.
Sorry, but I don't care if some random Romanian dating or eastern European crypto site has a weak password. I never signed up for it to begin with.
The problem was users (Score:2)
Users being asked to change their passwords generally means they're going to change them to another bad password--likely one that's also already been leaked.