Is Google Evil?

Mandy Leontakianakis

Evil? That's strong. But its Google's word.

'Don't Be Evil' is the company's informal corporate motto, a competitive, anti-corporate positioning settled on by Gmail creator Paul Buchheit who said  "I wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out." That weighs in a little on the indelible side.

'Evil' is about "exploiting users" (Buchheit).

Its also about avoiding conflicts of interest, remaining objective and avoiding bias in managing the responsibility of delivering a vast and powerful commodity of information to a trusting public. 

The idea and the promise is that Google doesn't accept money to favour content providers and holds itself to journalistic standards for the discernment of content.

Using a pejorative word like 'evil', not only in internal value 

speak, but as an industry benchmark, left Google wide open during their 2006 controversial self- censorship move into China. At this point, the company introduced the "evil scale" system and CEO Eric Schmidt talked the talk of "lesser evils"being for the "greater good". Hmmmm.

One wonders why they had to go and stick such a nasty word in their positioning.

No consumer psychologists on the payroll?

Google's compliance with the Great Firewall of China censorship surveillance project was attacked by Amnesty International and Human Rights' Watch:

"These forms of censorship seem to contradict the very principles that Google — whose unofficial motto is "don’t be evil" — was founded upon. Until January 2006, Google's Support Centre claimed that it "does not censor results for any search term", but removed this claim after reaching its deal with China." Amnesty

Google apologised, but added that access to some of Google's content was surely better for Chinese citizens than no Google at all.

This has given rise to much debate.

There are three positions on "Is Google Evil":

1. Yes

2. No

3. Necessary Evil: Yes, but I can't help loving it.

Intelligence Squared U.S held an Oxford Style debate on the statement: "Google Violates Its Don't Be Evil Motto". 

The Results: 20 percent of the audience agreed and 31 percent disagreed with the statement, with nearly half undecided.

Here are the arguments for and against:

Google Is Evil:

"Siva Vaidhyanathan, an associate professor at the University of Virginia, argued that Google is in fact guilty of all of the seven deadly sins (for which he used the Latin names). Here is a condensed version of his argument:

Luxuria (extravagance or lust): The people who work there get massages. That is corporeal lust of the highest order.

Gula (gluttony): They can eat all day, no matter what they want. There is so much food that they never need to say no. That is the very definition of gluttony.
Avaritia (greed): The Google-Yahoo advertising deal is one of many examples of Google overreaching to corner a market, or completely undermine a market, in an effort to maximize its returns.

Acedia (sloth): Its very model of advertising is based on free-riding. Google makes money off of our work. We blog, we put our cats on skateboards and record them for videos. We do all of this work, and then Google harvests our work, runs all of this content through this computers, spits it back out at us, with almost no actual value added.

Ira (wrath): There are hundreds of small companies all around America that have found their Google ranks decline significantly because they tried to optimize their results. They were just doing what a company should do, trying to get more attention for themselves. And Google’s algorithms, its faceless, soulless algorithms, came at them with wrath.

Invidia (envy): . Google has recently tried to push its suite of services that directly compete with Microsoft Office. Of course they have at various times threatened to muscle out eBay, muscle out PayPal, muscle out Amazon, in various ways.

Superbia (pride, or hubris): The actual motto of the company is “To organize the world’s information to make it universally accessible.” What could be more hubristic than that?

Google Is Innocent:


"Defending Google was Jeff Jarvis, the blogger who is writing a book called “What Would Google Do?” He listed eight virtues of Google, sans Latin. Again, here’s the condensed version:

Google has opened up the world’s knowledge to the world: No longer do we end an argument saying, I don’t know. We go to Google. Google will tell us.

Google respects the wisdom of the crowd: Google learns what it learns because it trusts us.

Google takes the wisdom of the crowd and it gives it back to us: Look at the Google Flu Trends search. It lets us know how often we search for a flu, and how the flu trend is

 coming. That is our knowledge, not Google’s.

Google connects people: We often are accused online of being anti-social. I think we’ve become hyper-social. I think we’re more connected. Admit it, how many of you have searched Google for an old girlfriend or boyfriend?

Google is a platform that enables us to create: It is an age of creation, and Google creates the platforms, the tools to let us create, the means to let us pay for that.

Google does have ads: [Web publishers] can do what we want with our ads. We can start whole businesses with [Google]. We can create movements with it. We can be found with it. And I believe that Google ads will help support the future even of news.

Google.org is trying to solve (with hubris) the problem of energy and global warming: Politicians are trying to get us on energy with regulation and taxes and prohibitions and slaps on the wrist. Google is giving this investment, and innovation, and invention.

Google has a new model on how to treat employees: We get, they get, massages. [He stops here because his time runs out." New York Times Bits Blog 

Bits went on to survey its readers.

Here are some of the comments:

“EVIL!” declared George Burdell. “They are advertising company mining your data and flooding your eyeballs. Everything else is a trail of candy to get you into the store.”

“Try living in a foreign country…. (Thailand)……no libraries, minimum access to publications/books/news. Google is a savior!” wrote John Oles.

“They’re not evil, but we need to keep an eye on them,” commented B. Mull. Dominik Pucek wrote, “Yes, Google is evil. But dammit, I like it!”

And my personal favourite:
“ Yes, Google is nothing but pure evil and must be exorcised, purified, and sanctified. As such, I am sending Father Merrin to Mountain View on the papal jet immediately. May the Force be with You.”
— Pope Magnus XVII