My Galaxy Phone

There are plenty of conspiracy theorists who believe Google is not to be trusted, which was not helped by the company dumping its “Don’t Be Evil” mantra the day it became Alphabet. That number appears to include Google itself.

An eagle-eyed Reddit user has spotted that, if you visit the Google Transparency Report and check on the status of Google.com, you’ll get a warning from the company that all is not well with its own product:

It’s “partially dangerous”, apparently, with Google warning that its own pages may try to install malware on your computer, trick you into downloading something or steal your credit card information.

Amusingly, if you do the same test for Bing.com – Microsoft’s search engine – Google is quick to reassure you that you won’t have any issues at all.

 Google.co.uk also gets a clean bill of health:

So, what’s going on here? Well, the safe-browsing tools are automated, and most likely someone was using Google’s services to host something malicious. That comes with the territory when you’re as big a site as Google. Indeed, other huge sites with user-generated content are not immune from being highlighted as dangerous, including Tumblr and GitHub.

It is possible that the malicious sites have already been removed – Safe Browsing isn’t a real-time scanner, according to Google’s own FAQ on the subject. The same FAQ also says that the company has had “very few false positives,” but on this occasion I think we can take the findings with a small shaker of salt.

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