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The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’
- greenyoda 13y agoNote: This is a review of a book by Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, written by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.
- mmorearty 13y agoYes, sort of -- although actually the New York Times correctly labeled it an "opinion" piece rather than a book review.
- kmfrk 13y agoHacker News's favourite technology pundit wrote another great book review: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113272/eric-schmidt-and-jared-cohenthe-new-digital-ages-futurist-schlock http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113272/eric-schmidt-and-j....
- contingencies 13y agoThis largely echoes Assange's views on the book, in longer form. The good news is that, thanks in part to this superficial and megalomaniacal book, the company’s mammoth intellectual ambitions will be preserved for posterity to study in a cautionary way. The virtual world of Google’s imagination might not be real, but the glib arrogance of its executives definitely is.
- Svip 13y agoI am never in full agreement with Julian Assange, but Google has in recent years, shown their disapproval of privacy. Eric Schmidt's 'if you have nothing to hide' ideal expresses quite clearly - to me - the fundamental problem in his - and by extension, Google's - view on data and users. But I must confess, that Julian Assange seem to be rather well spoken. And language wise - at least - it was a rather joy to read. Seemingly unlike the book he was reviewing.
- cletus 13y agoThis particular misconception of Eric's words really annoys me because it's blatant misrepresentation. What's more, the press (who area always looking to create controversy in the interests of page views), only mentions half the quote. Full quote [1]: > I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities Google is subject to the laws where it operates. Just this week a judge compelled Google to comply with warrantless searches (ie National Security Letters) [2] Any sane person should. For anything you do online you should ask yourself this "what would your reaction be if this were made public?" The gist of Eric's quote is that what you may consider "private" just isn't due to changing company policies (eg Facebook's continued privacy snafus), bugs, the courts and the legislature. There is a good lesson in this. Just go to bing.com/social and search for "cheat exam" or similarly embarrassing terms to see why treating the Internet as public is a very good idea. Disclaimer: I am a Google engineer but the views expressed are my own and don't represent my employer. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Privacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Privacy [2]: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57587003-38/judge-orders-google-to-comply-with-fbis-secret-nsl-demands/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57587003-38/judge-orders-g...
- pseut 13y agoI don't see how it's a misrepresentation. Schmidt could have left out, "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place" without changing the substance of the rest of the message. Has he issued a clarification elsewhere that contradicts the parent's interpretation? He could, easily.
- mayanksinghal 13y ago> changing the substance of the rest of the message It most definitely changes the substance. From Google being the perpetuator of the said privacy problem, it becomes a participant that is legally bound to participate by YOUR legal system. Disclaimer: Googler.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoThe problem of various "revolutions" is that we no longer have great leaders. There are influental leaders, but none truly great ones. Just like with music bands, we no longer have The Beatles or The Queen. I struggle to name three great present-time politicians. In the absense of great politicians, any post-revolution cabinet degrades into tyranny of mediocrity or fails to work at all.
- lukifer 13y agoI have high hopes for Elizabeth Warren. I also hope Lawrence Lessig runs for national office someday. But the general trend you refer to is accurate. The various vested interests have got character assassination down to a science, and anyone who doesn't play ball at least a little tends to be filtered out of the political process.
- tome 13y agoI agree that there are no great world leaders at the moment but that doesn't mean we "no longer" have them. Clinton was the most recent great leader in the West, in my opinion. We could easily have another in the next decade. Blair was nearly there, as is Merkel, though she feels like more of an administrator than a leader.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoI fail to see either of them as great. They're the difference between a (wo)man in office saying right words and one saying wrong words. They certainly got most of their words right but anyone could say those. From great leader I expect doing something nobody else in their position could.
- lukifer 13y agoI could make a case that a good leader is mostly hot air. What distinguishes a great leader is performing the right words and gestures for their zeitgeist, thereby becoming a symbolic figurehead that shapes broad social forces into real progress. Perhaps, then, our lack of good leaders is not about the leaders themselves, but rather due to the fragmentation of cultures and social institutions.
- droopyEyelids 13y agoWhen you think about the power Google has, Don't be Evil is still a real value of theirs, and we should be grateful. Most people won't even let themselves imagine what could be done with Google if evil was an option. How many hours would it take to compile a list of everyone who searches for incest porn and correlate that with 'people who are judges'. Considering that the incest fetish runs as high as 10% such information could be used to perform a bloodless coup. Call the legal system nullified, and lobbyists obsolete. And that is just one facet of the simplest way Google could be used for evil (blackmail). There are infinite ways Google's information asymmetry could be exploited, and most of them would be completely invisible and 100% effective. Thats why I'm glad we have Sergey and Larry running under the banner of "Don't be Evil." It shows that even from the beginning they realized they were going to wield terrible power, and they were a bit honest with that fact.
- jiggy2011 13y agoTrue, but it's not in their interest to blackmail people. If people knew people who were being actively extorted in relation to their google searches then everyone would switch to Bing or DDG in a second.
- mgkimsal 13y agoIt's really not just your google searches though - every site you visit that runs adwords is reporting your info back to google - just visiting a site directly can leak info, regardless of searches. Search history is obviously the low-hanging fruit, but Google's tentacles reach pretty far.
- jiggy2011 13y agoYes, but if nobody trusts them then they would suddenly find life very difficult.
- crabasa 13y agoThe minute that anything even remotely resembling that happens, you will find the full force of the federal government and every possible legal resource come to bear on Google. The hypothetical that you stated isn't just related to judges, it's relevant to the most powerful people in the world. Which is precisely why it won't happen. The people in charge at Google understand this existential threat and that is why every feasible cultural and technical safeguard exists to prevent this from happening.
- fuddle 13y agoAlso this is great interview between the authors of the book and Julian Assange: http://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt.html http://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt.html
- Aqueous 13y agoI agree with some bits, and Julian Assange is a compelling writer, but he is too cynical. It's surprising that someone who would embrace the democratizing power of consumer technology by way of Wikileaks would be so skeptical of the exportation of that very same technology. It turns everyone into both a producer and consumer of information, including (and especially) him. It establishes a more perfect marketplace of ideas and is therefore the enemy of authoritarianism and closure.
- saurabhnanda 13y agoI think you missed the point. The "pure" technology has democratizing effects, but as soon as you mix government with technology you get "controlled technology" or "regulated technology" of sorts. Which is very, very dangerous from a personal freedom standpoint. In today's world, how much does your government know about you (or can get to know about you) via digital / technological means v/s the other way around?
- Aqueous 13y agoPoint taken, but in many cases the exact same information available to the government is available to all of my friends and every random Joe. Most of my web and email communications, like those of many people, are protected by RSA encryption and the last I knew no government has yet enough computational power to efficiently break RSA. They can subpoena Google to get my emails but they could do that 10 years ago, too. Whereas before there was total information asymmetry between the government and its people (the government knew far more about the people than the people knew about each other or the government) the Internet has more or less obliterated that asymmetry. The government can take measures like installing backdoors (and of course I agree that this shouldn't happen) but overwhelmingly the tide is pointing in one direction: towards informational equality. In those cases where there is a serious attempt by the government to regain its foothold over our information, it's not consumer technology that's the problem it is legislative overreach.
- trotsky 13y agoIf you think the internet has obliterated informational asymmetry you reallty haven't thought much about the issue - the internet and IT has literally revolutionized surveillance, transforming the states ability to keep tabs on an extremely limited set of high value targets into one where nearly every citizen is surveilled by state emchanisms many times per day. The Inyernet certainly doesn't give the public the ability to analyze all of the telephone calls out of the state department or anywhere close, just as one simple example.
- pdog 13y agoPreviously, Julian Assange met with Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Schmidt and Cohen had requested the meeting to discuss ideas for their book, "The New Digital Age". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5574589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5574589
- saurabhnanda 13y agoJust like national security is kept out of purview of all "Right to Information" acts, what will it take to make some personal information either legally, or technically, untrackable by the government? What will it take civil contractors to install backdoors inside government IT systems to regularly let the voting public know what their government is really discussing/emailing.
- Heliosmaster 13y agoProps to the tribute to Hannah Arendt in the title
- doe88 13y agoThanks for pointing this reference, I didn't know it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banality_of_evil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banality_of_evil
- jinfiesto 13y agoFor anyone who doesn't know, the title of this article is a reference to Hannah Arendt, a political theorist who made her career covering the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. She coined the phrase 'The Banality of Evil.' This was in reference to the idea that people will follow the orders of authority figures even if they conflict with personal beliefs.
- thebear 13y agoAdditional info: there's a new movie out this weekend about Hannah Arendt and her covering the Eichmann trial. It got 100% on Rotten Tomatoes: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/hannah_arendt/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/hannah_arendt/
- DanielRibeiro 13y agopg has written about some Milgram Experiment[1] on The Perils of Obedience[2] which actually seems to comfirm this idea that people will follow the orders of authority figures even if they conflict with personal beliefs. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=W147ybOdgpE http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v... [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/perils.html http://www.paulgraham.com/perils.html
- smsm42 13y agoI suspect if the authority figure says "Our motto is don't be evil, so do as I say and it's not evil since we do no evil", compliance would be even better.
- mattmillr 13y agoIn the transcript of the June 2011 meeting between Schmidt and Assange, Schmidt also makes a reference to 'The Banality of Evil' (http://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt.html http://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt.html)
- ianstormtaylor 13y agoInterestingly in this interview between Assange, Cohen and Schmidt, which was linked elsewhere in the comments, Schmidt was actually the first one to say the phrase "the banality of evil". [1] [1]:http://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt?nocache#1125 http://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt?noca...
- Eliezer 13y agoI was summarizing MIRI's reasoning about how to ethically build Friendly AI as "Don't be a jerk" before I even heard what Google's motto was. I think it's a perfectly good motto and an inspiring one.
- kmfrk 13y agoI clearly get the impression that Eric Schmidt and Sheryl Sandberg are grooming themselves for public office. If people think their influence doesn't extend beyond "the technology industry", consider what it would mean if they ran successfully (and didn't pull a Meg Whitman).
- mark_l_watson 13y agoI watched the interview video with Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen on the NYT site this morning and then read some of the reviews of their book on Amazon. Apparently the book is heavy on foreign policy with little advice on preparing for the future in a business sense. As much as I sometimes enjoy free services from Google, FB, Twitter, etc. I also think that people like Julian Assange and Richard Stallman have an important message and warning for maintaining some control over personal data and our computing infrastructure. In the video interview Eric Schmidt makes a point that they want people to opt-in for 'Google total information awareness' (I am using that term, he didn't). I make an informed decision on what information I will share but most of my non-tech friends (who are representative of the general public) do not. Part of me likes a smaller world via the Internet, communicating with people with similar technical interests no matter where they live, and G+ and Twitter are great for this. On the other hand, I would also like to see a local network, possible centered around my town's library, that is effectively local to the small town I live in. The technology (encrypted VPN) is straightforward for implementing private group communication.
- dreamdu5t 13y agoJulian Assange is an idiot. He blames the victim. Google is a problem for privacy!? The US government is! Nobody forces you to use Google, and Google isn't the organization secretly gathering information with secret warrants. That's the US government, who is forcing Google (and any company in their way) to do their bidding. Why not focus attention on the actual bad guys: The NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the White House, and the entire fucking national security committee.
- phaer 13y agoBecause Google's (and other) gadgets are the sugar coating for surveillance. Nobody would voluntarily wear a government-mandated gps-tracker with a remote-controllable microphone, but most people (including myself) are readily buying them from Google which enables governments to access a lot of interesting data with far less outrage as if they would access is directly. I am not following closely, but Mr. Assange does seem to have some public criticism of the organizations you mentioned.
- dreamdu5t 13y agoRight. So instead of directing our ire at the government which is using the gps-tracker with remote-controllable microphone to spy on you, we should be angry at Google because the government happens to use them to accomplish this end? If Google closed up shop tomorrow, the government would not stop doing this! I'm sorry but in no way does Google deserve scrutiny over the FBI/CIA/DoJ.
- quadrangle 13y ago"Nobody forces you to use Google" is an example of a very problematic common bit of rhetoric. You can also say nobody forces you to use the internet or have a car or whatever else. Google is not a true monopoly, but they are monopolistic. They exist in a world of oligopolies. There is not as much choice as there should be, and this is a threat to privacy and to freedom. Having non-democratic oligopolies is already a threat, period. Forced to use Google? No, but Google is certainly interested in convincing you to use them. So many people are convinced and aren't aware of any issues. In the end, "forced to use" is bad rhetoric because it is a straw man. Nobody was arguing to the contrary. Tearing down that straw man fails to address the actual problems.
- PaulHoule 13y agoA few years back there was a pizza and Mediterranean restaurant run by a bunch of Egyptian immigrants in my town. They continuously ran middle eastern TV on a few sets, and I'd be watching music video programs that gave phone numbers that people in Iraq, Kuwait, and other Arabic zone countries could send text messages to to vote for music videos. My wife and I concluded that anybody who's been suckered into voting for their favorite music videos wasn't going to be a Jihadist, in fact, such a person would be harmless to anyone. After Boston, however, I am not so sure.
- just2n 13y agoI'm being forced to look at ads that I don't want to see which contain products that I neither want nor need. And this is being perpetuated as "the business model of the internet" by Google, creating an excuse to pervasively (often perversely) invade privacy, you know, "so the ads are more relevant." How do we classify that? Is it not evil? Given the basic premise, I can't imagine anyone classifying it anything but.
- antihero 13y agoI hate you I hate you I hate you, you fucking rapist piece of shit. But this article is fucking amazing. But you are a rapist scumbag. Fuck you Julian Assange, you could have been so fucking brilliant but you are a fucking rapist and FUCK YOU
- skore 13y agoIt just struck me while reading this and I'm probably just reiterating something that was better put by somebody smarter than me, but: The correct response to "Why do you care so much about privacy? Do you have something to hide?" is: "From whom?". If you define privacy from the wrong end, you end up with the wrong conclusions. The important question isn't "What do you feel comfortable sharing?", but "How come so many parties have curious interests in what I'm sharing?". Of course, if you are google, phrasing the question as "think about what you want to share" makes it so that in answering the question, people basically follow a path that is profitable to you. With that, they focus your suspicions on the wrong end of the conundrum. Yes of course, you should be careful about what you do anywhere in public and yes of course people have lessons to learn with the internet. But it's not as if humans are completely removed from the basic concept. In Medieval Times, people didn't run naked across the market thinking nobody would see them. Treating people as though the most important thing was to educate them about not posting naked pictures of themselves online (or whatever makes a better example for "you shouldn't be doing it in the first place") means infantilising them. No. The question is: Who is so curious about what I do online. Cui bono!? Google most definitely profits from hyperfocussing people on themselves. Just like websites do SEO to present themselves in their best way to the search engines, we now want humans who make themselves presentable, easy to index entries in the databases of our society.
- msg 13y agoAssange and Stallman overlap on a lot of this content really. Stallman is about liberating technology and Assange is about liberating information. I think it's clear that this is the future Google wants. If they occasionally have to hand over documents to the government, that's just the price of optimizing the lattes for the rest of us. If you don't like personal information lying in the hands of third party corporations and powerful officials, you have a first world problem. What I am waiting for is a foundation focused on privacy. Our digital lives should be no one's rummage sale. The foundation would create software to make social networking truly controllable and private. No ability to read my private messages, no mandate to make money from me, no personalization, no backdoors.
- bascule 13y agoA company whose incentives are aligned with its consumers truly has the power to not "be evil". Google was not that company. It doesn't mean that company is impossible.
- quadrangle 13y agoThe way to align interests with the consumers is to be consumer-owned, i.e. a cooperative. Reality is that all businesses have a huge range of complex interests.
- joering2 13y agoI submitted this good IMHO read couple days ago [1]. Whats interesting is that at that time, Google Chrome was not displaying "website ahread contains malware". but now it does. Can someone confirm that there is a malware indeed? http://www.dailytech.com/Googles+Eric+Schmidt+Dont+Be+Evil+was+Stupid/article31544.htm http://www.dailytech.com/Googles+Eric+Schmidt+Dont+Be+Evil+w...
- suredo 13y agoTo me, Google is becoming more evil since Google+... but more importantly since the removal of the + and - operators for Google searches.
- cromwellian 13y agoShould be titled the Banality of Google Strawmen for the often repeated conspiracy theories of Google working with the NSA. Assange, who was on the cypherpunks list (as I was in the late 80s/early 90s), should know better when he writes something like "The advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism. This is the principal thesis in my book, 'Cypherpunks.'" He clearly was present for the Clipper chip fiasco which showed the state's fears over cryptography in the hands of private citizens, and the central tenet of cypherpunks was a belief that modern, unbreakable, cryptography could defang the state's ability to invade privacy. Back then, the big debate among 'punks was stuff like untraceable assassination markets using BitCoin-like distributed money in which police and the state were powerless. Anarcho-capitalists were salivating over how in the future people would be able to share and communicate with no intervention. Point being, if you want privacy guarantees, truly want certainty, the technology exists to secure it. He was in fact, part of a movement aimed at providing the software to do it and make it easier for the average person. His experience on WikiLeaks shows how one can keep secrets from the state, even the US Government. How one goes from the idea that cryptography presents the opportunity for undefeatable privacy, anonymity, confidentiality, etc no matter how much the state is against it, to, voluntary use of Google is the death of privacy, I don't get. Now, I never believed that cryptography alone could overcome the state, but a lot of cypherpunks did. But there was a huge intersection between cypherpunks and libertarians, who would take the view that people have the right to trade their personal information and that there is nothing evil or bad about organizations offering to make that trade. I also think people are too fixated on Google, when VISA/Mastercard, your Bank, your phone carrier, and your ISP have much longer, more comprehensive, and detailed records on your behavior that the police can, and have, been monitoring far longer and with less oversight. Remember Carnivore? Do you trust Comcast? I trust Google more to fight for privacy of my data against the government, than any of those organizations. After 9/11 AT&T practically rolled over for the US government. When a crime happens, the police can subpoena your email, but the reality is, they obtain your phone and financial records first. Google's stock price would go to $0 if there was a serious breach of trust, the company is built on that. AT&T or Comcast are not built on love of their products. Google's "Don't Be Evil" motto is not about perfection, it is a value, a gradient, that you strive for. As Assange alludes to, Google culture is made of a mixture Silicon Valley graduate student culture, the hacker ethos, etc. The company chock full of 10,000+ people who believe or have internalized these values to some extent, whether you believe they are deluded cultists, or naive, that's how folks feel. There's simply no way Googlers would tolerate something like secretly sending user data to the NSA, it would be too hard to prevent internal employees from revolting. As an employee, I'd rather Google lose money and stock price and have the government shut them down, than send a firehose feed to the NSA.
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- grandalf 13y agoI'm curious if anyone agrees with Assange's point about the silly emphasis on Terrorism, Iran, and carefully chosen groups of 3rd world people who can be rescued, but disagrees with his larger points about the book and Google. My guess would be that most of those criticizing Assange in this thread support US policy on terrorism, Israel, Wikileaks, illegal spying, drones, etc. Most Americans (in both major parties) support government policies on these issues, and so HN readership is unlikely to differ much.
- PhantomGremlin 13y agoI strongly disagree. Most Americans are indifferent and/or oblivious to most government foreign policy. Yes, 9/11 was a big deal in this country, and so most Americans support a "war" on terrorism. But the rest of it is totally off the typical American's radar. I'd venture that a majority of Americans couldn't find Israel on an unlabelled world map. Nor could they articulate US policy for/against Israel. Same with Wikileaks, illegal spying, drones, etc. A majority of Americans don't know anything about those, nor do they support (or oppose) government policies on those issues. I think that HN readership is atypical of "most Americans". IMO.