It's emotionally difficult to find out about flaws in something you trust. I think humans really like black and white thinking, and crave association with peopl

It's emotionally difficult to find out about flaws in something you trust. I think humans really like black and white thinking, and crave association with people and institutions with blemish-free reputations. But the truth is that nothing and no-one is blemish free, especially if you zoom in on them enough. If you let it, then this truth can make you feel like you can't trust anything or anyone. But its not true. You can trust. Although blemishes are universal, the scale of the blemishes are not. The key to trusting again in a world of flaws and faults is perspective. Is the flaw large or small? Does the agent accept it and want to fix it, or do they deny it exists (a much worse problem!)? Everything has flaws, everyone makes mistakes, often people behave badly. That is never going to change. The thing we have to judge is whether the self-corrective systems in place are doing their jobs to acknowledge and repair the damage. IOW, making a mistake shouldn't determine trust, but failing to address the mistake should. One might call it "second-order trust". If you accept that, then the missing piece of this story is Google's response -- although they removed the offending malware from the Play Store, the journalist didn't apparently contact Google for anything else, like what steps they are taking (if any) to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. Ars didn't say anything about contacting Google, so I'd say that is an indication of lazy journalism, itself a sad but endemic problem in a world where we all have another false belief, that useful screens should be free (as in beer).