At least not for any of the reasons sited by Scott Granneman in his March 3, 2005 article: Where is Google Headed? As the bad guys start using Google more and more, the company wrestles with some new security and privacy issues with AutoLink.
Scott suggests that Google should somehow stop bad guys from exploiting sites with security flaws, giving an example where Google stopped the activity after just ten hours. Ten hours! That isn’t a very long time for something that was unknown until the day it hit. If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns as the old saying goes. Likewise, guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Google didn’t do anything wrong. The authors who created the security problem did. Bad things happen to good people sometimes. That is just life.
He goes on to question the ethics of Autolink, something that only works with Internet Explorer thus far, adding links determined from term searching the page. As he points out, it only works IF EVERY TIME the reader manually hits the autolink button (thereby indicating he wants the auto links.) Google is not rearranging the page, changing the text, or doing anything else untoward — it is doing what the reader asks, providing other possibly relevant links.
I need better examples than these to convince me Google did anything wrong on these issues.
