Should We Trust Google?

Late last year, in early October, Google announced in a blog post that the company had exposed the information of 500,000 or more Google+ users. As part of a routine audit, the company said, "we discovered a bug in one of the Google+ People APIs."

The problem with this admission was the timing. As Google noted: "We discovered and immediately patched this bug in March 2018." So Google announced the bug seven months after the discovery, and only after a Wall Street Journal report on the breach.

Google failed to disclose the bug earlier, the Journal reported, "because of fears that doing so would draw regulatory scrutiny and cause reputational damage."

Um, yeah. The fallout was speedy. As The Verge reported at the time: "The damage is already spreading. The consumer version of Google+ is shutting down, German privacy regulators in Germany and the US are already looking into possible legal action, and former SEC officials are publicly speculating about what Google may have done wrong."

(Recently, after a second reported breach, Google decided to expedite the closure of Google+).

Yet the breach, or the closure of Google+, or even the impending legal issues, was not the real problem for Google. The cover-up was the problem.

For the first time, like many others, I asked myself a simple question: Can I trust Google--the company I rely on for so many of my client's online marketing needs?

After all, just to state one (ironic) example: I base my online reputation management services on Google.

Can We Trust Google?

Prior to last year, the public relations firm, Edelman, noted in its annual "Trust Barometer" that more people trusted search engines for news than news outlets themselves.

But last year, in a time of intense skepticism about the media, the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer revealed a decrease in trust for search engines (and social media) relative to traditional news.According to Edelman, since 2017 trust in search engines and social media in the US has dropped 11%.

Much of this distrust is the result of Facebook's recent problems, specifically the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This scandal likely accounted for the results of  Pew Research Study, which found that "over a quarter of all users, and more than forty percent of younger users (ages 18-29), have removed the Facebook app from their phones...and over forty percent of users have taken a break from the site for a few weeks or more."

Read: Is Facebook Still a Viable Marketing Tool? 

Over the years, Google has avoided scandals; in fact, by many measures the company is the most trusted worldwide.

Last October, around the time of the Google+ announcement, for example, PRWeek reported on a study that named Google the company with the best reputation for corporate responsibility worldwide. Seemingly, Google was immune to the erosion of trust that plagued the rest of the tech industry. As PRWeek noted:

"The tech industry’s overall corporate responsibility reputation declined the most of all industries, with a 3.9 point drop in workplace, a 2.9 point decline in citizenship, and a 2.7 point decline in governance. Tech fell by 3.1 points overall."

Google's "saving grace" in this survey was its "workplace reputation," famed in the business world for its shared sense of purpose.

Previously, Google had won first place on Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For six years straight--from 2011 to 2017. Perhaps more telling, though, Google did not even make this year's list, like due to concerns about the equality of its opportunities.

Of course, Google's reputation does not necessarily speak to the concerns of small business owners who use Google for online marketing, they do reveal a good view of the company's trustworthiness. Despite the mishaps, Google has proved itself reliable over its twenty-years of existence. And Google (unlike Facebook) is an absolute necessity for most small businesses. Imagine your business, for example, without Google My Business or any of Google's reputation-based services.

Can we trust Google? Probably. Should we trust Google? For now, yes: Most of us must be cautiously optimistic.

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