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Google closing down carpool service tied to Waze in September

Yahoo Finance's Allie Garfinkle discusses the outlook for Google's Waze business as well as the growing cybersecurity threats the tech giant faces.

Video Transcript

[AUDIO LOGO]

BRIAN CHEUNG: Also in the tech space, Google getting some attention as it recently said it will end its six-year-old carpool service tied to Waze. As a reminder, Google bought Waze for about $1,000,000,000 in 2013. The question, how does this impact the future for Google's strategy for satellite navigation? Let's bring in Yahoo Finance's Allie Garfinkel here with the answer, Allie.

ALLIE GARFINKLE: You know, it's funny, Brian. I actually don't know if I have the answer. I don't know if anybody does just off the cuff. Waze still has about 150 million customers using its navigation service. But this draws into question a lot about what Waze's future looks like, right? At one point, this was an area Google was really excited about.

Remember, Google bought Waze in 2013 for about $966 million, which adjusted for inflation is about $1.27 billion today. So, of course, Waze then launched its carpool app that it's now shuttering. To be fair right now, carpool isn't a great area to be in. It's very much seen as a pandemic casualty, Brian. But in Waze's case, it's not exactly clear where they go next.

AKIKO FUJITA: And Allie--

ALLIE GARFINKLE: [INAUDIBLE] by the way.

BRIAN CHEUNG: I love that.

AKIKO FUJITA: Allie, a separate issue here, Google's been dealing with a number of cybersecurity threats regarding Gmail accounts. What's the latest on that?

ALLIE GARFINKLE: Yeah, Akiko, there's been cybersecurity news coming out of Google left and right right now. Some of it's really impressive, right? For instance, Google Cloud stopping what's believed to be the biggest distributed denial of service attack that we've seen ever. You can think of those attacks as looking to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server.

On the other hand, you've seen news that's maybe not so great. You have vulnerable bugs in Google Chrome. And you have very few, but some Gmail accounts that have been successfully hacked by a group with backing from the Iranian government. So a lot of cybersecurity news. And this news is actually coming out as we've seen major breaches in crypto. And we've recently seen vulnerabilities in Apple products too.

I was asking why. And one of my sources, Andrew Rubin, CEO at zero trust firm Illumio, he actually said it clearly. He was like, cyber attackers are getting smarter and bolder. And even tech giants like Google and Apple are not immune. Alphabet shares are down about 23% year to date as of this morning. So we'll see what happens.

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