You love Google. But why do you trust them?

Everybody loves Google. They revolutionized the search business, built a great web email client, have some nifty maps, and a bunch of other cool stuff in the works. The engineers at the company are obviously brilliant, and Google deserves much of the praise it receives. But respecting a company for its engineering chops is quite a bit different than trusting that same company.

I was inspired to write about this after seeing reports of an upcoming Google Wallet, which will supposedly be some sort of competitor to PayPal (although Google denies this, of course). A posting about Google Wallet on Slashdot.org contains mostly praise for Google's new payment service, and very little discussion of the potential challenges and trust issues surrounding Google's latest move.

The fact is that being smart has (relatively little) to do with being trustworthy or reliable, and Google has not to date launched a service that would allow one to gauge the reliability and trustworthiness of the company. The closest they've come to handling user data is their Gmail service, and email is a far cry from running (what is essentially) a bank. Security, for one, is a lot bigger challenge when one is handling money, rather than the latest email to grandma. Fraud management will also be a big challenge.

I wish Google well, and I look forward to trying the new Google Wallet. But I'll be skeptical until I see that they've got what it takes to run such a complex service.