Sigh.
“Don’t be evil” presumes a lot when there are organizations that have machine guns and legal jurisdiction over you, and a public, decades-long track record of doing evil.
“Don’t be evil” presumes a lot when there are organizations that have machine guns and legal jurisdiction over you, and a public, decades-long track record of doing evil.
Law enforcement has always been able to subpoena this type of information. From phone companies, credit card companies, ISPs, etc. If Google wants to legally operate in the United States then they don't have any choice but to comply.
The bigger issue, IMO, is that nobody has any idea who else has access to this information. Google can share this information with anybody. It's entirely on good faith that people trust them not to.
One would have to be a total fool to think that an internal prohibition on evil would be at all meaningful, even if somehow it were strictly adhered to. Literally nobody at Google is willing to be imprisoned to defy the orders of the nation in which its situated.
(Before you point out that it requires judicial oversight: please read a dozen federal search warrants. The standard for search warrants is hilaribad, and feds suffer no consequences whatsoever for putting whatever fantasies they want into their applications for same.)
"Don't be evil," was always a gimmick, IMO.
Not sure there's any real solution, though. As long as there's a government, there's going to be somebody who thinks it's evil.
Always? It struck me that it was a genuine creed for a burgeoning tech company who recognised established tech companies were evil, and so were themselves endeavouring to be "not evil".
Consider their business model from day 1. It didn't take long before the allegations of email data mining started to surface.
Also, "evil" is such a subjective word that it's almost meaningless with no context.
You do remember that Google is an Ad company, and information is the product, right?
Take private owner gun sales. You have to collect the information of the person you're selling it to. You can't not collect it, and if you take the attitude that you won't, you yourself can be held criminally liable.
If we had cryptoanarchy -- unbreakable encryption, with everything on device, anonymous, and any server services using some future form of fully homomorphic encryption, and with financial transactions done with pseudo-anonymous cryptocoin, you'd find this to be a very unstable situation, and most world governments, even European governments, would quickly pass laws to require the ability to track identity, de-anonymize, and subpoena logs.
There is no way any of the Western democracies are going to move to a system where all records of activity are ephemeral and un-subpoenable.