It feels like there is a new story every week, or sometimes a few a week, of how Google is doing something untrustworthy or "evil" in the eyes of the general public.
Be it changing their privacy policy, Google's SPYW in Kenya, Search Plus Your World over the top personalization, and most recently cookiegate - I ask myself, at what point does Google lose that trust given to them by their users?
The more and more users have handed over their most private information, in exchange for convenience, personalization, storage and more - the more users had to trust Google. But with all this bad PR for Google, will users revolt? Not you or I, but real users? I doubt it - which is sad, because users are lazy, uneducated and wouldn't even know how.
Of course Google prides themselves in making it easy to turn off things and take your data with you. But they know very well, most users won't.
The bigger issue is, as Google gets their hands into more and more areas of the web (are they currently not in everything?) - the more this issues will come up.
Google can keep saying that they had best intentions and it was done for the user but at some point they will and have lose the trust of their most important asset, the user.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Cre8asite Forums.
Image credit to ShutterStock for faith blocks.
