Company: GOOGL
Filing Date: 2025-02-05
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001652044-25-000014
Chunk: 98

Company: Alphabet Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-05
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 98
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 and security incident response capabilities, including dedicated worldwide incident response teams, our response process, particularly during times of a natural disaster or pandemic, may not be adequate, may fail to accurately assess the severity of an incident, may not be fast enough to prevent or limit harm, or may fail to sufficiently remediate an incident. As a result, we may suffer significant legal, reputational, or financial exposure, which could harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. 

For additional information, see also our risk factor on privacy and data protection regulations under ‘Risks Related to Laws, Regulations, and Policies’ below.

Our ongoing investments in safety, security, and content review will likely continue to identify abuse of our platforms and misuse of user data. 

In addition to our efforts to prevent and mitigate cyber attacks, we are making significant investments in safety, security, and review efforts to combat misuse of our services and unauthorized access to user data by third parties, including investigation and review of platform applications that could access the information of users of our services. As a result of these efforts, we have in the past discovered, and may in the future discover, incidents of unnecessary access to or misuse of user data or other undesirable activity by third parties. However, we may not have discovered, and may in the future not discover, all such incidents or activity, whether as a result of our data limitations, including our lack of visibility over our encrypted services, the scale of activity on our platform, or other factors, including factors outside of our control such as a natural disaster or pandemic, and we may learn of such incidents or activity via third parties. Such incidents and activities may include the use of user data or our systems in a manner inconsistent with our terms, contracts or policies, the existence of false or undesirable user accounts, election interference, improper ad purchases, activities that threaten people’s safety on- or off-line, or instances of spamming, scraping, or spreading disinformation. While we may not determine some of these incidents to be material at the time they occurred and we may remedy them quickly, there is no guarantee that these issues will not ultimately result in significant legal, financial, and reputational harm, including government inquiries and enforcement actions, litigation, and negative publicity. There is also no guarantee that a series of related issues may not be determined to be material at a later date in the aggregate, even if they may not be material individually at the time of their occurrence. 

We may also be unsuccessful in our efforts to enforce our policies or otherwise