Is Google Evil?

Begin forwarded message:

From: [email protected]
Date: October 26, 2006 9:54:28 PM EDT
To: [email protected]
Subject: Is Google Evil?

Is Google Evil?

News: Internet privacy? Google already knows more about you than the  
National Security Agency ever will. And don’t assume for a minute it  
can keep a secret. YouTube fans--and everybody else--beware.

Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the two former Stanford geeks who  
founded the company that has become synonymous with Internet  
searching, and you’ll find more than a million entries each. But amid  
the inevitable dump of press clippings, corporate bios, and  
conference appearances, there’s very little about Page’s and Brin’s  
personal lives; it’s as if the pair had known all along that Google  
would change the way we acquire information, and had carefully  
insulated their lives—putting their homes under other people’s names,  
choosing unlisted numbers, abstaining from posting anything personal  
on web pages.

That obsession with privacy may explain Google’s puzzling reaction  
last year, when Elinor Mills, a reporter with the tech news service  
cnet, ran a search on Google ceo Eric Schmidt and published the  
results: Schmidt lived with his wife in Atherton, California, was  
worth about $1.5 billion, had dumped about $140 million in Google  
shares that year, was an amateur pilot, and had been to the Burning  
Man festival. Google threw a fit, claimed that the information was a  
security threat, and announced it was blacklisting cnet’s reporters  
for a year. (The company eventually backed down.) It was a peculiar  
response, especially given that the information Mills published was  
far less intimate than the details easily found online on every one  
of us. But then, this is something of a pattern with Google: When it  
comes to information, it knows what’s best.

 From the start, Google’s informal motto has been “Don’t Be Evil,”  
and the company earned cred early on by going toe-to-toe with  
Microsoft over desktop software and other issues. But make no  
mistake. Faced with doing the right thing or doing what is in its  
best interests, Google has almost always chosen expediency. In 2002,  
it removed links to an anti-Scientology site after the Church of  
Scientology claimed copyright infringement. Scores of website  
operators have complained that Google pulls ads if it discovers words  
on a page that it apparently has flagged, although it will not say  
what those words are. In September, Google handed over the records of  
some users of its social-networking service, Orkut, to the Brazilian  
government, which was investigating alleged racist, homophobic, and  
pornographic content.

Google’s stated mission may be to provide “unbiased, accurate, and  
free access to information,” but that didn’t stop it from censoring  
its Chinese search engine to gain access to a lucrative market  
(prompting Bill Gates to crack that perhaps the motto should be “Do  
Less Evil”). Now that the company is publicly traded, it has a legal  
responsibility to its shareholders and bottom line that overrides any  
higher calling.

So the question is not whether Google will always do the right thing— 
it hasn’t, and it won’t. It’s whether Google, with its insatiable  
thirst for your personal data, has become the greatest threat to  
privacy ever known, a vast informational honey pot that attracts  
hackers, crackers, online thieves, and—perhaps most worrisome of all— 
a government intent on finding convenient ways to spy on its own  
citizenry.

<snip>



http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/11/google.html