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Comment by blub | Hacker News Reader

Maybe he is an asshole, but at least Larry Ellison didn't build a company to spy on half the planet like Page & Brin.

> Maybe he is an asshole, but at least Larry Ellison didn't build a company to spy on half the planet like Page & Brin.

The toolbars and other crap which the JRE installer / autoupdater tries to sneak on to unwitting users' systems ARE spyware.

On one hand, it was Sun that introduced that idea.

On the other hand, Oracle seems to have embraced it.

He failed to make half the world use his company's products, among other things.

BTW I'd appreciate if you gave an example of a highly successful and ethically impeccable company.

>ethically impeccable company

First of all this is moving the goalposts significantly and is also an impossible standard. I would say that Apple and Microsoft are more ethical than Google but the question is of course along what axis?

It's easy to hate on big companies for one or 2 publicly criticized decisions, but never know the thousands of non public decisions that made that choice the best one, or the thousands of non public stories of the good stuff they do.

Not to say companies should get of easy, but you can't project a huge multidimensional entity into a single axis of ethical or not.

TBF, GP was shifting goalposts in turn. Whenever you hear anything like, "Alice did X, but at least she's better than Bob who did unrelated thing Y" you know the goalposts are being moved (at best) or your attention is being misdirected nefariously. It doesn't add anything valuable to the discussion.

Perhaps, but I think that's closer to poisoning the well. Google don't have to be moral to deserve legal representation but since they are far, far from moral it does mean I won't count it as a moral victory when they win a court case.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish[1] Microsoft?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

  He failed to make half the world use his 
  company's products, among other things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuous_truth

Do you know any other way to personalizing search results, making the search results by analytics and even creating a search engine company without putting ads on the page?

Anonymity is one thing but there is no other way of solving this problem without collecting user's data.

Google was ethical under Brin, and it showed when they pulled out of China. None of their units shared data, they had a solid privacy policy. And their main business was search and ads vs. profiling. When Page took over they completely changed course.

Brin wasn't the CEO, that was Eric Schmidt.

Apple.

Ha, pretty ironic statement, considering the CIA was Oracle's first real customer: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-cia-made-larry-ellison-a-...

EDIT: downvoted for pointing out facts...?

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