suspicious update request

Question

suspicious update request

Yesterday or the day before I got a surprising alert that I've never seen before. Initially I ignored it because I was busy, but then I got suspicious.

It says, "Google Earth Helper was unable to update," or something similar. I decided that this alert was bogus, so I deleted Google Earth and the matching folder in Applications Support. The alert continues to display intermittently. How can I find out what this is, and eliminate it?

MacBook Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11), 3 GHz core duo, 8GB RAM

Posted on Aug 20, 2016 4:25 AM

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Answer 1

Aug 20, 2016 4:36 AM in response to Nicky McCatty

SO, I finally found an answer on Google Product Forums.

Viet-Tam Luu said:

Quick update: we've rolled back (undone) the changes that caused the update notifications so hopefully these will subside soon enough.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend removing the updater itself, as it may be used for other installed Google software (you can learn more about the Updater, or the version of it that we open-sourced, here: https://code.google.com/archive/p/update-engine/).

Regarding the password prompt, this is due to the latest version of the Plugin being installed as a system-wide software (just like the desktop Google Earth app is), rather than an app local to the user's account (as older versions did), which is why it is prompting for a password for login--just the same as if you were installing the desktop Earth app. So there's nothing nefarious going on--but again I do apologize about any concerns this may have caused.

Thanks,

Viet-Tam Luu (Google Earth developer)

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