This article is about exported documents, i.e. the point at which you say "I am leaving the ecosystem of my chosen tool".
The wording of the interstitial page says "If you do not want to visit that page..." i.e. it's about whether you expected to visit one website or another. Surely google.com is as 'surprising' to the user as any other page.
I changed some param values, I don't know what they do. But with the original values it remembered my preference. So it seems like they're tracking and storing clicks.
>Surely google.com is as 'surprising' to the user as any other page.
The metric isn't how surprising it is, but how potentially malicious it is. The entire point of the redirect is so the user can make a conscious decision not to visit a potentially-malicious page.
Google.com and Youtube.com, operated by the same people who made the docs tool, make the entirely-fair assumption that neither contain malware.
That being said, I also think it's the wrong argument to make. It makes very little sense that an exported document needs these interstitials. It would make more sense if it applied them to hosted Google Docs, but not things that are self-hosted by an end-user.
It would be one thing if they had an allowlist or denylist of sites that were not just their org. It's another thing entirely when they allow all Google sites through but not their competitors. I can imagine there being abuse of monopoly powers claims to be made here. Links to YouTube videos in a Google spreadsheet will take half as many clicks as links to Vimeo videos, which will result in fewer lost conversions.
How is it unfair if they allow their own websites which they maintain and develop to have no malware?
> Here's an interesting one. It gets allowed even though the HTTP cert has lapsed.
I doubt any human is going through and vetting every website. It's not a perfect system - I'm sure there will be websites through the cracks.