Google has abandoned the race to win the Pentagon’s USD 10 Billion Cloud Competition. The tech giant announced its latest decision hours after confirming Google+ users’ personal data were exposed.
The Pentagon contract took its name “The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud (Jedi)” after the Star War films.
If Google had won, the contract could have helped Google catch up with Amazon and Microsoft. Currently, Amazon and Microsoft take the market leader in providing cloud computing services to government and businesses. Bids were due to be submitted on Friday.
A Google spokeswoman has said they are not bidding on the Jedi Contract because they are not sure if it would support AI principles and the portions of the contract were out of scope with current government certifications.
This might be due to the fact that currently Google is only allowed to handle moderate data only and not sensitive material.
Google Malfunction
On Monday the firm had announced that it was closing Google+ after for the consumers after a massive data breach. The firm had discovered the bug in March.
While the company was reviewing how the company shared data with other application the malfunction was discovered which made it possible for third-parties scraped 500,000 members’ private data.
However, Google had found no traces of the flaw being exploited and was not able to specify the users affected by it.
The Wall Street Journal had reported that Chief Executive Sundar Pichai was briefed seven months ago and due to fear of drawing regulatory scrutiny avoided making the matter public.
The bug’s discovery coincided with Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal. European data privacy watchdogs are now looking into the affair.
