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CEO Sundar Pichai is trying to undo recent damage to Google’s public image.
Photo:
stephen lam/Reuters
For all the brilliance housed at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters, political astuteness seems in awfully short supply.
Consider last month when parent company
Alphabet
Inc. declined to send one of its top officers to Washington to sit alongside peers from
and
to field questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee. An even more damaging reminder came on Monday, when The Wall Street Journal reported that the company found a potentially damaging bug in the heart of its Google+ social network this spring but chose not to publicly disclose it.
That bug could have allowed outside developers to access users’ nonpublic data. Tests by the company found a relatively small number of users exposed to the flaw, but the bug existed within the service’s code for more than two years before its discovery, making it difficult for the company to fully quantify the potential impact.
Google announced several corrective steps in response on Monday, including the full-shutdown of Google+ for consumers. But Google also defended its decision to keep the news under wraps, claiming that there is no evidence that any developer was aware of the bug or had misused any user data.
Alphabet’s shares rebounded by the close of trading Monday to register only a modest retreat. The loss of a social network that no one socialized on won’t really dent an advertising business expected to generate more than $116 billion in revenue this year.
Sitting on the news does dent the company’s image, though, as did its absence in Washington. That episode produced an empty chair with Google’s name on it that was televised to the world—right next to occupied ones for Facebook and Twitter.
CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly has been meeting with lawmakers since to repair some of the damage. Even better would be for Google to start doing the smart thing—and the right one—the first time around.
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