[IP] Is Google Evil?
Begin forwarded message:
From: EEkid@xxxxxxx
Date: October 26, 2006 9:54:28 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
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
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