Google de-emphasizes 'Don't Be Evil' motto in its code of conduct
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
Play Services won't install on unapproved devices anymore.
Sideloading apps doesn't work the same way on Daydream as it does for the main Android system (can't launch non-Google Play store apps inside Daydream).
BS software patents on applying arithmetic coding to video compression.
Many webpages that only work on their webbrowser.
Long-con bait and switch as they morph into Microsoft of the 90s?
-- Harvey Dent , in The Dark Knight
Microsoft let the hardware go open-source and generic. And that was an incredible win.
Conversely, Apple and Google ruined handheld computers (which we now call smartphones) forever. So far, anyway. They're fundamentally unsecurable. It's at least nontrivial, and perhaps impossible, to prevent surveillance and tracking.
Are Gates and Rockefeller using their influence to set agenda in poor states? - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jan/15/b...
Monsanto, US, & Gates Foundation pressure Kenya to reverse GMO ban - https://www.rt.com/news/328014-kenya-gmo-us-gates-monsanto/
Gates Foundation is spearheading the neoliberal plunder of African agriculture - https://theecologist.org/2016/jan/21/gates-foundation-spearh...
(And there's lots of articles attacking from a more purely anti-GMO stance, which I don't find particularly helpful, as it's largely the politics/economics behind Monsanto that are the most disturbing.)
Right - and that's the scary thing. We see what he did in the realm of computing --- now imagine the parallels in the agricultural infrastructure of countries across the world.
And I give him almost no credit for giving some money now. He's giving away stolen money while living in the lap of luxury. Gates acted completely amorally for most of his life and now is simply buying his way into respect. I'm not a Christian, but I'm reminded of Luke 20:45-21:4.
But his Foundation is well-run and effective. Maybe he was a net good for humanity. Probably not, though.
Also, I think a great momentum of Linux in the late 90s was precisely because people hated Microsoft wholeheartedly, and that was one of the main reasons it didn't die as another toy project. So I'd say yes, a net good for humanity - not because but in spite of what he's done so far.
Also, Bill Gates' mom was into public service in big way, so there's some family history. [0] This sort of thing used to be fairly common in the American upper class.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates
Edit: punctuation
> BS software patents on applying arithmetic coding to video compression.
https://xiphmont.dreamwidth.org/84214.html
Also, you missed the biggest one: joining Steve Jobs's anti-poaching agreement, depressing Bay Area software engineer wages for years.
Look at self driving car engineer salaries today. Those wouldn't have happened under a no-poach agreement. Compare to the mobile OS race, with tens of billions of dollars (at least) on the line. The no-poach agreement between Apple and Google prevented them from beating each other with engineers, so the money poured into lawyers' pockets through litigation instead.
I wonder how many relic Intranet apps force the use of old IE in Corporate world because they were built with the 'extended' dialect of JScript.
Outside of Google-owned sites, many sites simply don't work properly in Firefox and require Chrome. Could it be the additional privacy features? It might be the web developers' fault, though.
“All the AI stuff is a result of acquisitions” - woefully misguided. Google is hiring academia leaders left, right, and center and growing a collaborative environment that’s innovating. They’re discovering a lot of stuff in-house on this team. They’re building an incredible open-source library with almost 100K Github stars for machine learning.
@self driving, they hired people building projects and are making it into a production self driving car. The latter is a far less constrained problem.
@assistants, The Google Assistant can do way more than Alexa. Not seeing how this is a me too game
Very arguable, considering how Apple Watch was announced in 2014, while Google Glass was first shown off in 2013.
True, but I'd say that has been more Facebook's, Apple's and Microsoft's (Skype's) fault. Google offered it for a couple of years, but no big player started to use federation. So I wouldn't blame Google for pulling the plug on something not being used.
However, your list of evil-doing can be extendend, e.g.
- AMP https://hn.algolia.com/?query=amp&sort=byPopularity&prefix&p...
Can this submission's title be changed to something like: "Google Deemphasizes "Don't Be Evil" Motto in Its Code of Conduct"? That'd at least frame this change accurately for discussion.
[Edit: I see the change was made. Thanks!]
“Randomly”? The very end is where you put whatever you want to be the most important key summation and takeaway message of a document like this.
The CoC is not a news article, and the dynamics are different there. And burying the lede is when you mislead by putting a key point that shifts, rather than summarizes, the understanding conveyed by rest of the article late in a news article.
“The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.”
“We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”
“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.”
“Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who “deserves” to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed.” [0]
The phrase "Don't Be Evil" seems like a kitschy nod to Google's earlier days when they were just a couple of programmers in a garage. However, that was decades ago and Google has grown into a more matured entity. This statement comes from a time before Google had to meet with Government agencies on a (probably) daily basis or start policing YouTube for terrorist beheading videos and pornography. They are actively trying to do good - but they're no different than IT - you only complain about when things go wrong, never when they go right. Google does plenty of good, they don't need a snide comment about how everyone else doesn't to do that.
To remove this artifact of the past isn't to say "it's time to start being evil!". It's a child putting away their toys as they move to more mature times.
EDIT: As someone mentions, the line is still there. Leaving my post up as it still stands if they took it out tomorrow.
That's just depressing.
To invoke Godwin at an early stage, I doubt Hitler thought he was evil.
So yea, getting rid of it could be seen as a sign of a more nuanced understanding of the world.
I sincerely hope you don't think that meeting with government agencies and/or adhering to regulations means they can't be doing evil.
In my mind, it is largely aspirational because it takes a back seat to 'make Google money.' Or perhaps making money is by definition not evil, so if you're making money by what you are doing it is transitively not evil.
When I worked at Google, management explained it to be "Would you be embarrassed to be a Googler if what you were doing showed up on an article on the New York Times? If so then chances are its evil, don't do that." But then came Project Maven, a sort of real world test, and well that is still going on now isn't it?
Alternatively, “Do the right thing” could easily mean “correct” thing, as in the sentence, “If Dr. No did things the right way, he would have immediately killed Bond when he had the chance”
They really can’t win either way.
The only question I have is.. why? One generally hopes that everyone is out to do no evil, including those that do so unintentionally.
So why remove something that's been so closely associated with the company for so long? Did some executive find it "tacky"?
At any rate, this is truly a loss for the internet.
Its a symbol. It has as much meaning as you ascribe to it.
Its a publicly traded company, not a crusader for internet goodness
investors often enjoy investing in companies that they can relate to.
one hopes that most people ascribe to do no evil.
a+b+c is not a bad combination
in the end, i agree it's a symbol.. but also scrapping that symbol reflects on the company that no longer wants to be associated with said symbol.
They didn't, per the body of the article (contrary to the headline.)
Anyone that was with google from the beginning knows the significance, and to try to play off "hey they used it in a sentence" as some sort of passivity, doesn't really grasp the depth of the change. (IMHO)
Yes, but neither the headline, nor the text of the article, nor any of the commentary here so far mentions the significant difference in the excerpts shown, which is only tangentially connected to removing gratuitous repetition of the phrase “don't be evil.”
The signficant change is removing the value statement connected to the old motto in the first paragraph of the excerpt from the older Code of Conduct: “Yes, it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can. But it’s also about doing the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably, and treating co-workers with courtesy and respect.”
(Now, it's possible that those value statements were redundant with other parts of the CoC or that the revision moved them to someplace other than the place preceding the rest of the excerpt and that they retain equal prominence in the new CoC, in which case the selection of the excerpt boundaries would be another misleading aspect of the article. And you can even make the case that they were largely redundant with the last sentence of the second paragraph of then old—first of the new—excerpt, so that, while it's more significant than dropping a few repetitions of “don’t be evil”, it's not all that significant.)
When they filed their IPO, it was one of the very first things they included in the IPO
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504...
.. now it's been reduced to a footnote at the end of a sentence.
If you don't get the significance of this, you're either, very young, very naïve, or astroturfing.
I guess what is confusing is how subjective "the right thing" can be. If an employee were to cite this new slogan and try to address a problem with it, is the right thing to capitulate or to defend. Who is to say really.
It almost seems like it is reworded to be more vague so higher ups can just wave their hands and say these aren't the droids you're looking for. But, are they waving their hands at employees protesting the mistreatment of customer data and privacy? Or, are they waving their hands at the powers that be who want unfettered access? I guess time will tell.
I don't know what triggered the change in stance but this may have triggered the removal.
Citing 'Don't Be Evil' Motto, 3,000+ Google Employees Demand Company End Work on Pentagon Drone Project [0]
[0]https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/04/04/citing-dont-be-...
Oussama Ammar of TheFamily, a successful accelerator in Paris, agrees with you and claims that an effective motto must be one that can be disagreed with. It must in some way take a stand.
"Don't be evil" wouldn't work at Goldman Sachs, for example, where people might argue that little evils must be done in the service of the greater good, or that "the market" is the one who decides what is right or wrong. "Don't be evil" seems to imply that the ends should not be used to justify the means.
"Do the right thing" could probably be more acceptable at Goldman, because as you note it's more subjective and allows for small evils that work in the service of greater goods -- it seems to allow for the ends to justify the means.
The new code of conduct still contains a direct admonishment of “don't be evil”, as the article states.
So, no, I think your reading is unsupported by the source.
“You’re right Johnson. Take that don’t be evil line out”
'Dear turing test candidate, how would a program to do this and that look like.'
Or 'business strategy'.
There are real threats to the transition though. My honest fear is that the people who discover it make themselves immortal gods and subjugate or kill everyone else.
Subjugation already happens. When it's easier to keep the population poor and just raid the natural ressources of a country, that's the way it often goes.
Nobody declares our rights, we feel them in our guts. And the public feels this one in their gut without me having to explain it, which is why I call it a right: If something is generally accepted by the public, it is a de facto right. For example you could repeal the 1st amendment tomorrow but that wouldn't change anyones mind about whether freedom of speech is their right. But if you want me to stop being pedantic and actually defend my position, I would argue that people should have this right so that spammy AIs don't just ruin human interaction all together. Imagine a world where you never know if you're talking to a real person or some kind of AI trying to sell you something subtly... Not knowing explicitly whether you're talking to an AI or a real human could have a chilling effect on human-to-human relations.
Now google duplex can go and phone up every businessowner asking for the current store hours (or whatever), thus dumping the work of updating google's information on the store owners at essentially no own cost.
And the store owner does not even have a chance to find out whether it is a customer that will in some probability show up, or if he's just being used.
[0] which is necessary to pretend there is anything even worth having as a story here at all. “Google updates Code of Conduct; reduces number of repetitions of phrase ‘don’t be evil’” is an obvious nothingburger.
[1] the final line; in any long document, the very beginning and very end are the most prominent.
Hmm.. I'll believe Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, before I believe that.
Also using "nothingburger", a prominent phrase used by Trump supporters to lampoon the Muller investigation is an interesting choice of words.. but fits very well.
You have a strange agenda, friend.
It wasn't mixed in (the article itself notes it was retained unchanged) and the final sentence isn't a random placement but, along with the first, one of the two most significant places in a long document of this type—the beginning is where you put meant you want to shape the reading of the rest, the end is where you put the most important high-level key takeaway.
> Also using "nothingburger", a prominent phrase used by Trump supporters to lampoon the Muller investigation
I've actually never noticed in that context, apparently it's a big thing on Twitter in that context, but I'm quite selective of my consumption in that channel.
But the terms been in use for 60+ years.
> You have a strange agenda, friend.
What agenda is that, then?
One hopes you have an agenda.
They're now about the same size, do similar things that people once criticized Microsoft for, and Microsoft is seen in a much better light now. The motto no longer applies.
That it's now called "marketing", speaks to fundamental changes at Google.
I'm fairly certain that narrative, and it's popularity, precedes Twitter by at least a few years.
Here's an Atlantic article that details a bit of the history:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/evil-co...
Evil corporation all around.
>The video was made in late 2016 by Nick Foster, the head of design at X (formerly Google X) and a co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory. The video, shared internally within Google, imagines a future of total data collection, where Google helps nudge users into alignment with their goals, custom-prints personalized devices to collect more data, and even guides the behavior of entire populations to solve global problems like poverty and disease.
>When reached for comment on the video, an X spokesperson provided the following statement to The Verge:
>“We understand if this is disturbing -- it is designed to be.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/17/17344250/google-x-selfish...
> Google prompts users to select a life goal and then guides them toward it in every interaction they have with their phone.
As measured against Goldman-Sachs.
They said no! https://i.redd.it/htqi8nuk6xx01.jpg
That still seems way better than the alternative.
Information on the drone program: https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/
Google's complicity in Project Maven: https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1254719/project...
Google's Internal Debate: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-14/inside-go...
Very remnicient of IBM's involvement in the Holocaust.
What about software that is adapted by the military for new use cases instead of tailored use cases? Should Microsoft be responsible for damage caused operations planned in Word and PowerPoint? What about iPhone with sniper windage apps? How many layers removed before a company is considered ethical?
We should focus our criticism on people that are doing bad things and know it. We don't need to dive into the most murky territory in order to achieve worthy effects when there's so much low hanging fruit.
With regards to novel threats, it'd be nice if the military could justify these investments without resorting to propaganda, and outright lies. There should be a clear explanation that most people would understand the necessity of and how it works in their interest.
If the military wants to use technology to enhance their killing techniques, then they should do it themselves with in-house development.
If they can't that's just too bad.
If we're going to have a military at all then our warfighters deserve the best killing technology we can provide to help keep the enemy from killing them. While the military does do some research in house, since we live in a capitalist society much of the work will always have to be done by private contractors.
Like biological and chemical weapons? Or more like Napalm buring through children? Or metal-free landmines that are even harder to remove after war?
Unless you are a corporatocracy and the inability of civil society to rein in the surveillance state betrays a fundamental breakdown.
The irony is if this was a Chinese company cooperating with the military on their drone program that is in active service and is killing people in far off lands as we speak there would be a global hue and cry and a frenzy of sanctions and global demonization, often by the same people defending Google now. This kind of brazen hypocrisy is what's wrong with the world today.
More interestingly, they removed another sentence from that paragraph:
"[...] providing our users unbiased access to information."
In other words, Google wants to crack down on wrongthink without violating their own code of conduct.
That sentence was stupid right from the beginning.
Now maybe you'll say Google should know you're programming in C++ all the time, so having learned that, Google should be able to infer that when you type in "split string", the results should all be for C++.
Except then somehow Javascript comes into your requirements and now you need to retrain your Google to give weight to that.
I'd much rather be able to use the Google, not my Google, so that I get more predictable results. It's already annoying that I can't tell people to google something and be sure whatever I'm talking about is in the top ten results of their Google.
> That sentence was stupid right from the beginning.
Nothing about that sentence was stupid and it's frightening that you don't seem to understand the ideal of being "unbiased" (as in "unbiased reporting"). We're going to be heading in the direction where's there's "liberal" and "conservative" search engines, causing even more polarization of our collective world views.
It used to be that Google would show you lots of very diverse, interesting, and sometimes quite surprising results which would mean learning new things became almost "accidentally" easy. Now it seems more interested in finding things people already (mostly) knew about.