FX.co ★ Google's 5 biggest failures

Total surveillance

In August, Associated Press' journalists published the results of an investigation that said that Google's controlled services, such as Google Maps, spied on their users. The story became more scandalous because of the fact that surveillance continues, even if the owner of the smartphone has disabled this feature.

Google keeps daily logs about the movement of a person, and it is a threat to privacy.

The company itself acknowledged that it retains data about users, claiming that it makes it just to "improve the user experience."

The company made changes to the use of the Location History. According to the new policy point, turning off the Location History function does not affect the geolocation in other services of the company, for example, in Google Maps.

Thus, the IT giant had no effect on the situation but secured itself by changing the rules for using the function.

Discrimination against white men

Last year, a huge sexist scandal shook Google. Software engineer James Damore compiled a 10-page manifesto asserting that the current policy of recruiting women and people of different ethnic origins is erroneous. Damore explained the unsuccessfulness of women in the field of IT with biological characteristics and, in addition, stated that women hold managerial positions not because of their merits, but because they are a "minority".

"We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism," the author of the letter said.

The management of Google did not take sufficient care in motives of Damore and dismissed him for violating corporate ethics.

Now Damore is trying to sue his former employer, accusing him of illegal dismissal.

Glasses ahead of time

In 2013, the company started testing of Google Glass, which were supposed to bring augmented reality (AR) to the broad masses. But this project has remained one of the most disastrous in the history of the company. Firstly, the public was presented with a shoddy prototype, since co-founder of Google Sergey Brin wanted to know about the community's reaction to the new gadget as soon as possible. As a result, a bright presentation of the device could not convince skeptics and there was a large number of negative reviews: the appearance did not greatly suit the owners, as well as autonomy, and, in addition, glasses were overheating.

There is a version that Google Glasses appeared on the market before it was ready to introduce augmented reality into everyday life. However, even now this technology is not in high demand.

War with Trump

In late August 2018, US President Donald Trump criticized Google, advising companies to "be more careful" from now on. The American leader believes that Google deliberately shows only negative news about him, supporting liberal media and drowning out "right" publications.

The company, in turn, denies any political bias. This same opinion is shared by some IT experts who argue that Google's algorithms are insensitive to the political agenda. Nevertheless, the company is now under the close attention of Trump.

Abuse of power

Google has set two anti-records for penalties from the European Commission. Last summer, the company was fined €2.4 billion, which became the largest penalty in the history of the European Commission. The reason for this was the abuse of the position to promote its service with purchases: allegedly Google artificially dropped the sites of competitors in search results.

A year later, this record was beaten: Google received a fine almost twice as much as the previous one, €4.3 billion, for violating the antimonopoly legislation. This time the company was accused of using "anti-competitive practices" that were aimed at promoting the Android operating system, which already holds a dominant position in the mobile operating system market.