7 ms·

Is Google evil? (2017)

51 points by pcr910303 7y ago

RootKitBeerCat 7y ago
So google’s not evil because they disclose that they’re a wolf??
sgjohnson 7y ago
>The control and power of companies like Google and Microsoft is devastating to governments around the world because they have the power and the right to control whatever data they provide via their search engines. Actually, it's the exact opposite. They are tools of control. Google and Microsoft happily provides the governments of the world with whatever information they want about their users.
pferde 7y ago
Yes. Next!
roenxi 7y ago
There are two questions here: 1) Is Google more evil than a hypothetical benchmark company producing similar products? 2) Is the product space Google works in fundamentally bad? (1) is a pretty clear no, Google is about the best we could hope for given that a single corporation is in the product spaces that they are in and trying to sell ads. (2) is much less clear, there are many historical instances where the existence of a Google would have magnified the damage done. Realistically it isn't just them either, the radical dropping cost of surveillance was raised the other day and Google's work is only a small component of that.
- cartlidge 7y ago
  It isn't at all clear that (1) is true. Until recently, no-one was particularly concerned about companies which link advertisers and purchasers. Unless you say the hypothetical benchmark company is a company which tries to track you and build a database on you and basically spy on you, Google seems to be overtly more evil than any hypothetical benchmark company. Effectively you've defined yourself into a corner were the hypothetical benchmark company is Google, since they must be substantially identical in all relevant ways. It isn't sufficient that they are advertising mediators: no, they must be advertising mediators who track every detail of their users life. But even if we decide to compare within their business methods - not just their product space - and say, "given that they're Big Brother, are they an evil Big Brother or relatively more benign", it's not clear that they're benign. I have heard stories that leave my concerned (trying to produce a censored version for China, for instance, and gagging former workers who don't feel comfortable with that). I cannot provide evidence that they operate an evil business in an evil way, but it isn't clear that they don't. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Google worries me more and more, even though I'm tied to them more and more.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  > 1) Is Google more evil than a hypothetical benchmark company producing similar products? My military dictatorship is well above category average as far as totalitarian states go! We put -0.2% less of our population in jail, and assassinate less than one third of our closest competitor! Now bow down before my statue please.
supermatt 7y ago
So declaring that you are doing evil things makes you not evil? What a bizarre logic. What is evil? The dictionary defines it as "profoundly immoral or wicked". It also states that morals are "concerned with or derived from the code of behaviour that is considered right or acceptable in a particular society". So, as a society, do we consider it right or acceptable for a this private information to be collected and utilised in this way? If we deem it unacceptable (which I personally do, but I don't speak for society), then google is evil - along with all those others doing the same thing.
- ben509 7y ago
  The article argues the information collecting people agree to isn't evil. It then goes on to describe a whole other set of activities and their consequences, but doesn't characterize that one way or another. I don't need the author to draw a conclusion here, but it's odd they don't.
  - la_barba 7y ago
    Well, then why complain about anything companies do? Its all buried in some Terms of Service document that people agreed to anyway.
    - ben509 7y ago
      I think that's a fair point; fwiw I was just trying to clarify the article.
- evilGoogle 7y ago
  It's like antifa. anti-fascists is part of the name, so they can't be bad or fascistic.
tunap 7y ago
The recent(?) screwing down of results page that do not allow jumping to the n-th page or do not disclose any results past the 2 or 3 pages of paid results impels me to believe Betteridge's Law has been broken.
tromp 7y ago
This article predates the removal of "Don't be evil" from Google's Code of Conduct by about half a year. https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393 https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
- mda 7y ago
  It was not removed, still part of Code of Conduct.
  - llampx 7y ago
    So it applies to employees but not to the company itself?
    - mda 7y ago
      Employees == Company
DoctorNick 7y ago
No, they simply function in an amoral capitalist system which demands the maximum amount of profit.
- sgjohnson 7y ago
  There's nothing wrong with the system. You're free to use any of the alternatives. You think you would have that freedom in a non-capitalist system?
  - einpoklum 7y ago
    > You think you would have that freedom in a non-capitalist system? Obviously depending on which system, but - yes. Even kind of rotten systems like the state-capitalism of East Germany had different "freedom trade-offs". A local once described it this way: "Under the DDR you had an apartment, but you couldn't speak out on things. Now you can say whatever you like and nobody will care, but you can't afford an apartment."
jonplackett 7y ago
It’s weird how we still attach ideas of morality to a corporation. You could say google does evil but it can’t be evil in the normal sense of the word. It’s not a person. And you could say a Corporation is amoral. They just care about nothing except profit. The CEO and board have no duty higher than that.
- Retric 7y ago
  Companies can be more or less harmful than normal. We call humans evil not because they are the embodiment of a platonic ideal, but rather they do some list of horrid things. Similarly, some companies on net are just worse than others. To use a strait forward example workplace safety issues are often both detrimental to a company and harmful to it’s workforce. Amazon for example will store heavy objects at their warehouses under low overhangs forcing people to carry stuff while bent over, which regularly causes back injuries. That’s actively causing the company to lose money and gets people hurt regularly. In many ways companies are a set of policies than can and will change. But, nothing says those polices are neutral or optimal.
- addicted 7y ago
  I’d like to point out that the idea that corporations “care about nothing except profit” is a fairly radical and new idea that would have been completely alien to anyone from more than a few decades ago. It’s a testament to the success of the propaganda of the people who pushed this idea that, whether a good idea or not, the majority of people today consider it fundamental and will probably be surprised to learn how new it is.
  - SoylentOrange 7y ago
    I’m genuinely interested, can you provide a source for this? My understanding of companies is they have always been exploitative. Any large company from the gilded age is a good example (now almost a century ago). Further back, the companies of the industrial revolution were legendary for their amorality. Another example I’m familiar with is coal companies in Scotland before WWI.
IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
Google is surprisingly non-evil given it's size. Both the moral conviction of its founders as well as the lack of pressure that comes with taking in gobs of money probably contribute to it. Look no further than Facebook or Uber to see the contrast. Unfortunately, there's no guarantee those favourable conditions persist. So despite not being evil, Google is suspect just due to it's size. And even though Google has been actively good in many of the things it does (Summer of Code, their work with non-profits, Alphabet's various moonshot projects in the environmental or medical space), Apple has lately been giving them a run for their money in being actively and creatively a force for good in its core business, especially around privacy. It's not really something has the right to demand from them, but it does seem like they should have the potential to surprise us on occasion with technology aimed to solve the myriad problems societies are experiencing with the rising role of the web. A high-performant, hassle-free and verifiable alternative to TOR, say. Or a new paradigm that mends the growing conflict between advertisers and users, similarly to what Apple is doing with it's pseudonymous targeting scheme.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  Moral conviction? No idea what you're talking about. Lack of pressure? Whenever they get any orders from the government they operate under (like US National Security Letters or Chinese, uh, whatever it is the Chinese government issues) - they just comply with them. "Apple a force for good"? Yeah, tell that to the Foxconn employees, I'm sure they'll be thrilled. Or, again, to the people whose data is made available to the NSA. "mend the growing conflict between advertisers and users" - much of advertising is (mostly) hostile to the users, aiming to achieve results which are detrimental to them. So there's not much mending to be done.
  - gundmc 7y ago
    Google only complies with ~60% of government requests and frequently pushes back against suspect orders. https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview?hl=en https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview?hl=...
    - 7y ago
major505 7y ago
on a scale from zero to Facebook.... I would say its an 7. But is a 7 with lots of power, and plenty of people with good intentions. And the hell is full of people with good intentions.
einpoklum 7y ago
"Evil" is not a useful category. But Google is definitely maximizing the narrow interests of its share-holders at the expense of users and (what I consider to be) fundamental social interests, such as privacy, avoidance of undue psychological manipulation, limitation of government power etc.
foolzcrow 7y ago
Yes clearly
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tictoc 7y ago
Is being evil profitable?
scottndecker 7y ago
Author lists some potential solutions but fails to mention the Brave browser (brave.com), which I think is pioneering much of what they're talking about.
hnsocks 7y ago
People, listen the whistleblowers please. Listen arm dealers testimonies. Listen they office workers. Listen medical industry whistleblowers.. too many to mention who talk about alphabetic company and they plans.. And you have nerve to questioning they evilness ?
kaolti 7y ago
As long as it's either / or we're not gonna get anywhere with this conversation.
usr1106 7y ago
The question is not whether Google is evil or not. They have a business model that is mostly legal (there are probably some corners where they do not fully comply with GDPR and national data protection and consumer protection laws in Europe). So I wouldn't care how they run their business. If I don't like them I don't do business with them. The problem is that they are a monopoly and it's hard to avoid them. I know what I am talking about, because I use a Google-free mobile phone (not Apple either). I cannot rent e-scooters (which doesn't bother me) and I might have difficulties to buy/have to pay higher prices for public transit tickets in many European cities (which sometimes does bother me). The big failure is lack of antitrust enforcement. Google needs to be broken up like it happened to ATT in 1984.
zzo38computer 7y ago
Google is a large organization, and many large organization is both evil and not-evil. (Also, such things as "evil" and "not-evil" is not always so clear, anyways.) But, often you can use services and software other than Google, anyways; or at least, I can.
shultays 7y ago
I would argue putting ads that pops up next to your emails is evil

51 points by pcr910303 7y ago

So google’s not evil because they disclose that they’re a wolf??

>The control and power of companies like Google and Microsoft is devastating to governments around the world because they have the power and the right to control whatever data they provide via their search engines. Actually, it's the exact opposite. They are tools of control. Google and Microsoft happily provides the governments of the world with whatever information they want about their users.

pferde 7y ago

Yes. Next!

roenxi 7y ago

There are two questions here: 1) Is Google more evil than a hypothetical benchmark company producing similar products? 2) Is the product space Google works in fundamentally bad? (1) is a pretty clear no, Google is about the best we could hope for given that a single corporation is in the product spaces that they are in and trying to sell ads. (2) is much less clear, there are many historical instances where the existence of a Google would have magnified the damage done. Realistically it isn't just them either, the radical dropping cost of surveillance was raised the other day and Google's work is only a small component of that.

cartlidge 7y ago
It isn't at all clear that (1) is true. Until recently, no-one was particularly concerned about companies which link advertisers and purchasers. Unless you say the hypothetical benchmark company is a company which tries to track you and build a database on you and basically spy on you, Google seems to be overtly more evil than any hypothetical benchmark company. Effectively you've defined yourself into a corner were the hypothetical benchmark company is Google, since they must be substantially identical in all relevant ways. It isn't sufficient that they are advertising mediators: no, they must be advertising mediators who track every detail of their users life. But even if we decide to compare within their business methods - not just their product space - and say, "given that they're Big Brother, are they an evil Big Brother or relatively more benign", it's not clear that they're benign. I have heard stories that leave my concerned (trying to produce a censored version for China, for instance, and gagging former workers who don't feel comfortable with that). I cannot provide evidence that they operate an evil business in an evil way, but it isn't clear that they don't. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Google worries me more and more, even though I'm tied to them more and more.
einpoklum 7y ago
> 1) Is Google more evil than a hypothetical benchmark company producing similar products? My military dictatorship is well above category average as far as totalitarian states go! We put -0.2% less of our population in jail, and assassinate less than one third of our closest competitor! Now bow down before my statue please.

supermatt 7y ago

So declaring that you are doing evil things makes you not evil? What a bizarre logic. What is evil? The dictionary defines it as "profoundly immoral or wicked". It also states that morals are "concerned with or derived from the code of behaviour that is considered right or acceptable in a particular society". So, as a society, do we consider it right or acceptable for a this private information to be collected and utilised in this way? If we deem it unacceptable (which I personally do, but I don't speak for society), then google is evil - along with all those others doing the same thing.

ben509 7y ago
The article argues the information collecting people agree to isn't evil. It then goes on to describe a whole other set of activities and their consequences, but doesn't characterize that one way or another. I don't need the author to draw a conclusion here, but it's odd they don't.
- la_barba 7y ago
  Well, then why complain about anything companies do? Its all buried in some Terms of Service document that people agreed to anyway.
  - ben509 7y ago
    I think that's a fair point; fwiw I was just trying to clarify the article.
evilGoogle 7y ago
It's like antifa. anti-fascists is part of the name, so they can't be bad or fascistic.

tunap 7y ago

The recent(?) screwing down of results page that do not allow jumping to the n-th page or do not disclose any results past the 2 or 3 pages of paid results impels me to believe Betteridge's Law has been broken.

tromp 7y ago

This article predates the removal of "Don't be evil" from Google's Code of Conduct by about half a year. https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393 https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...

mda 7y ago
It was not removed, still part of Code of Conduct.
- llampx 7y ago
  So it applies to employees but not to the company itself?
  - mda 7y ago
    Employees == Company

DoctorNick 7y ago

No, they simply function in an amoral capitalist system which demands the maximum amount of profit.

sgjohnson 7y ago
There's nothing wrong with the system. You're free to use any of the alternatives. You think you would have that freedom in a non-capitalist system?
- einpoklum 7y ago
  > You think you would have that freedom in a non-capitalist system? Obviously depending on which system, but - yes. Even kind of rotten systems like the state-capitalism of East Germany had different "freedom trade-offs". A local once described it this way: "Under the DDR you had an apartment, but you couldn't speak out on things. Now you can say whatever you like and nobody will care, but you can't afford an apartment."

jonplackett 7y ago

It’s weird how we still attach ideas of morality to a corporation. You could say google does evil but it can’t be evil in the normal sense of the word. It’s not a person. And you could say a Corporation is amoral. They just care about nothing except profit. The CEO and board have no duty higher than that.

Retric 7y ago
Companies can be more or less harmful than normal. We call humans evil not because they are the embodiment of a platonic ideal, but rather they do some list of horrid things. Similarly, some companies on net are just worse than others. To use a strait forward example workplace safety issues are often both detrimental to a company and harmful to it’s workforce. Amazon for example will store heavy objects at their warehouses under low overhangs forcing people to carry stuff while bent over, which regularly causes back injuries. That’s actively causing the company to lose money and gets people hurt regularly. In many ways companies are a set of policies than can and will change. But, nothing says those polices are neutral or optimal.
addicted 7y ago
I’d like to point out that the idea that corporations “care about nothing except profit” is a fairly radical and new idea that would have been completely alien to anyone from more than a few decades ago. It’s a testament to the success of the propaganda of the people who pushed this idea that, whether a good idea or not, the majority of people today consider it fundamental and will probably be surprised to learn how new it is.
- SoylentOrange 7y ago
  I’m genuinely interested, can you provide a source for this? My understanding of companies is they have always been exploitative. Any large company from the gilded age is a good example (now almost a century ago). Further back, the companies of the industrial revolution were legendary for their amorality. Another example I’m familiar with is coal companies in Scotland before WWI.

IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago

Google is surprisingly non-evil given it's size. Both the moral conviction of its founders as well as the lack of pressure that comes with taking in gobs of money probably contribute to it. Look no further than Facebook or Uber to see the contrast. Unfortunately, there's no guarantee those favourable conditions persist. So despite not being evil, Google is suspect just due to it's size. And even though Google has been actively good in many of the things it does (Summer of Code, their work with non-profits, Alphabet's various moonshot projects in the environmental or medical space), Apple has lately been giving them a run for their money in being actively and creatively a force for good in its core business, especially around privacy. It's not really something has the right to demand from them, but it does seem like they should have the potential to surprise us on occasion with technology aimed to solve the myriad problems societies are experiencing with the rising role of the web. A high-performant, hassle-free and verifiable alternative to TOR, say. Or a new paradigm that mends the growing conflict between advertisers and users, similarly to what Apple is doing with it's pseudonymous targeting scheme.

einpoklum 7y ago
Moral conviction? No idea what you're talking about. Lack of pressure? Whenever they get any orders from the government they operate under (like US National Security Letters or Chinese, uh, whatever it is the Chinese government issues) - they just comply with them. "Apple a force for good"? Yeah, tell that to the Foxconn employees, I'm sure they'll be thrilled. Or, again, to the people whose data is made available to the NSA. "mend the growing conflict between advertisers and users" - much of advertising is (mostly) hostile to the users, aiming to achieve results which are detrimental to them. So there's not much mending to be done.
- gundmc 7y ago
  Google only complies with ~60% of government requests and frequently pushes back against suspect orders. https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview?hl=en https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview?hl=...
  - 7y ago

major505 7y ago

on a scale from zero to Facebook.... I would say its an 7. But is a 7 with lots of power, and plenty of people with good intentions. And the hell is full of people with good intentions.

einpoklum 7y ago

"Evil" is not a useful category. But Google is definitely maximizing the narrow interests of its share-holders at the expense of users and (what I consider to be) fundamental social interests, such as privacy, avoidance of undue psychological manipulation, limitation of government power etc.

foolzcrow 7y ago

Yes clearly

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

tictoc 7y ago

Is being evil profitable?

scottndecker 7y ago

Author lists some potential solutions but fails to mention the Brave browser (brave.com), which I think is pioneering much of what they're talking about.

hnsocks 7y ago

People, listen the whistleblowers please. Listen arm dealers testimonies. Listen they office workers. Listen medical industry whistleblowers.. too many to mention who talk about alphabetic company and they plans.. And you have nerve to questioning they evilness ?

kaolti 7y ago

As long as it's either / or we're not gonna get anywhere with this conversation.

usr1106 7y ago

The question is not whether Google is evil or not. They have a business model that is mostly legal (there are probably some corners where they do not fully comply with GDPR and national data protection and consumer protection laws in Europe). So I wouldn't care how they run their business. If I don't like them I don't do business with them. The problem is that they are a monopoly and it's hard to avoid them. I know what I am talking about, because I use a Google-free mobile phone (not Apple either). I cannot rent e-scooters (which doesn't bother me) and I might have difficulties to buy/have to pay higher prices for public transit tickets in many European cities (which sometimes does bother me). The big failure is lack of antitrust enforcement. Google needs to be broken up like it happened to ATT in 1984.

zzo38computer 7y ago

Google is a large organization, and many large organization is both evil and not-evil. (Also, such things as "evil" and "not-evil" is not always so clear, anyways.) But, often you can use services and software other than Google, anyways; or at least, I can.

shultays 7y ago

I would argue putting ads that pops up next to your emails is evil