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>Their motto was never "do no evil" - that's a far harder standard given that undesired side effects happen for most actions. One's capacity for evil indeed gr

>Their motto was never "do no evil" - that's a far harder standard given that undesired side effects happen for most actions. One's capacity for evil indeed grows greatly when one is given too much power. Likewise, as Google's power has grown inordinately, their public emphasis on "doing no evil" has diminished

jkaplowitz 8y ago
Yup. Though I still don't think it needs a change in intention - i.e. more evil can still result from more power, more "machine learning with more data to assist and suggest to delight users", without any specific evil intent. They definitely aren't better than most companies in certain corporate matters related to the employee experience (especially for those who are in one or more marginalized demographics), or in their willingness to be a defense contractor at all (back on topic for this news item). They also make plenty of product and PR mistakes. Still, many tech companies are notably worse on many important issues: more willing to directly facilitate military weaponry and intelligence for lethal purposes, less top-notch at security, fewer and weaker privacy promises, bad at rigorously implementing and adhering to the privacy promises they do make, more in the habit of voluntarily sharing direct access to your personally identifiable data with third parties, less willing to tolerate employees complaining about privacy/security/harassment/workplace issues, etc. Overall I think Google needs to be watched closely, forced to do the right thing by some mixture of internal external pressure, possibly split into 2-4 smaller companies, and needs to fix certain culture problems .... but I still think it's among the better of the large trendy US tech companies, alongside Microsoft. And GCP is awesome. Disclosure: I used to work at Google, including the GCP team; my mention of Microsoft is based on second-hand information from people I know who do or did work there.

jkaplowitz 8y ago

Yup. Though I still don't think it needs a change in intention - i.e. more evil can still result from more power, more "machine learning with more data to assist and suggest to delight users", without any specific evil intent. They definitely aren't better than most companies in certain corporate matters related to the employee experience (especially for those who are in one or more marginalized demographics), or in their willingness to be a defense contractor at all (back on topic for this news item). They also make plenty of product and PR mistakes. Still, many tech companies are notably worse on many important issues: more willing to directly facilitate military weaponry and intelligence for lethal purposes, less top-notch at security, fewer and weaker privacy promises, bad at rigorously implementing and adhering to the privacy promises they do make, more in the habit of voluntarily sharing direct access to your personally identifiable data with third parties, less willing to tolerate employees complaining about privacy/security/harassment/workplace issues, etc. Overall I think Google needs to be watched closely, forced to do the right thing by some mixture of internal external pressure, possibly split into 2-4 smaller companies, and needs to fix certain culture problems .... but I still think it's among the better of the large trendy US tech companies, alongside Microsoft. And GCP is awesome. Disclosure: I used to work at Google, including the GCP team; my mention of Microsoft is based on second-hand information from people I know who do or did work there.