Company: GOOGL
Filing Date: 2025-02-05
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001652044-25-000014
Chunk: 96

Company: Alphabet Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-05
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 96
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, even if unfounded, could harm our business, reputation, financial condition, and operating results. Our policies and practices may change over time as expectations and regulations regarding privacy and data change. 

Our products and services involve the storage, handling, and transmission of proprietary and other sensitive information. Malicious software such as viruses, software bugs, theft, misuse, defects, vulnerabilities in our products and services, as well as cyber attacks, phishing schemes, and other types of security breaches expose us to a risk of loss or improper use and disclosure of such information, which could result in litigation and other potential liabilities, including regulatory fines and penalties, as well as reputational harm. Additionally, our products incorporate highly technical and complex technologies, and thus our technologies and software have contained, and are likely in the future to contain, undetected errors, bugs, and/or vulnerabilities. We continue to add new features involving AI to our offerings and internal systems, and features that rely on AI may be susceptible to unanticipated security threats as our and the market’s understanding of AI-centric security risks and protection methods continue to develop. We have in the past discovered, and may in the future discover, some errors in our software code only after we have released the code. Systems and control failures, security breaches, failure to comply with our privacy policies, and/or inadvertent disclosure of user data could result in regulatory and legal exposure, seriously harm our reputation, brand, and business, and impair our ability to attract and retain users or customers. Such incidents have occurred in the past and may continue to occur due to the scale and nature of our products and services. While there is no guarantee that such incidents will not cause significant damage, we expect to continue to expend significant resources to maintain security protections that limit the effect of bugs, theft, misuse, and security vulnerabilities or breaches. 

We experience cyber attacks and other attempts to gain unauthorized access to our systems on a regular basis. Cyber attacks continue to evolve in sophistication and volume, and inherently may be difficult to detect for long periods of time. For example, the development and implementation of AI technologies may further increase our exposure to or exacerbate the risks of cyber attacks or other security incidents, particularly where such technologies are exploited by third parties to breach our or other parties’ systems, including when such technologies are used to target our employees or impersonate members of senior management in order to gain unauthorized access to our systems. We have also seen, and will continue to see, industry-wide software supply chain vulnerabilities, which could affect our or