Ex-Google workers sue company, saying it betrayed 'Don't Be Evil' motto
npr.org
npr.org
Reading the article, the lawsuit is about something more reasonable: They signed an employee code of conduct which included "Don't Be Evil". They organized a movement within Google in pursuit of contractually obligated motto, and believe they were fired for doing this organizing.
Say you were hired as security. You signed a contract stating you wouldn't let anyone enter the building who doesn't have a valid employee id. One day a VP forgets his ID at home, and puts you in a tough spot. Fearing you'd be fired because you violated your contract, you deny the VP access to the building. The VP is mad, and gets revenge on you by getting you fired. In this case, suing the company for following the rules it made you follow seems reasonable.
The problem here is "Don't Be Evil" is so vague. I'm unsure it will have enough standing to succeed, but it's not entirely unreasonable.
They're going to have an extremely uphill battle to fight if this is the basis of their legal argument. No reasonable person could understand the phrase, "Don't Be Evil," to mean, "Don't do things that I personally consider evil." For example, I very much doubt that a court is going to find that Customs and Border Protection is "evil," and thus any actions the plaintiffs took against Google's dealings with CBP were contractually mandated by the employment agreement.
To the extent that this is a headache for Google at all, it will serve as a great example as to why legalese and corporate-speak is so common in the U.S. Google tried to have a motto that, while legally ambiguous, expressed a sentiment about how they wanted to treat their users and act in the marketplace. There will be different opinions about how well Google lives up to the motto, but certainly at the time it was coined, that was the idea behind it. And now they're getting sued, essentially frivolously, over the language. If it causes them a problem, it's a lesson to other companies: avoid mottos that are subject to creative and motivated interpretation during litigation. Or to put it another way, don't have mottos.
Ambiguity in a contract benefits the party that did not draft it
A company breaking or changing policy is not by definition unlawful or a violation of any employee's rights in the US. There are exceptions to this, but many people would be blown away at the massive leeway companies have (e.g. only ~20 states consider PTO "earned wages", other states have far lower or no PTO protections on termination).
That said, their lawsuit isn't really about breach of contract, it's just one of the 5 counts they are trying to establish (the complaint is only 13 pages double spaced, totally worth skimming[0]):
COUNT I: BREACH OF CONTRACT
- Plaintiffs say they were fired for following the CoC and calling out evil (working with DHS / CBP / ICE) that Google was doing or considering doing.
COUNT II: PROMISSORY ESTOPPEL
- They would have taken a job elsewhere if they knew "Don't be Evil" wasn't going to be honored and gave up opportunities for no reason since it wasn't.
COUNT III: BREACH OF IMPLIED COVENANT OF GOOD FAITH AND FAIR DEALING
- Basically the same as count 1 but focused on bad faith by changing the policy.
COUNT IV SLANDER/FALSE LIGHT
- Plaintiffs say Google slandered them by falsely saying they leaked confidential information.
COUNT V: TERMINATION IN VIOLATION OF PUBLIC POLICY
- Plaintiffs say they were fired for exercising protected political action and/or for their membership of protected classes.
In my opinion the DHS / CBP / ICE child separation policy is pure evil, so is a lot of the incarceration this country[1], but the lawsuit isn't going to come down to the definition of evil so much as it will come down to California employment law.
[0] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21119310-google_comp...
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/black-children-were-jaile...
That said I do agree it's an uphill battle to try to get a court to seriously interpret "evil". It's a tautology at best, i.e. "don't do anything you shouldn't do".
> “Don’t be evil.” Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our users. But “Don’t be evil” is much more than that. Yes, it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information. focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services we can. But it's also about doing the right thing more generally ~ following the law, acting honorably and treating each other with respect.
That is pretty specific. You need to provide users unbiased access to information, focus on their needs, and give them the best products and services you can. You also need to follow the law, act honorably, and treat each other with respect.
The courts do in fact understand legally-binding terms to mean something. (See also the fact that IBM's lawyers sought a specific exemption from the JSON license's "The Software shall be used for Good, and not Evil," because they knew there was a chance the courts would find something they did "Evil," because if it's in a contract, it means something.) So what do they mean?
Some of these clauses - "giving them the best products and services we can," "acting honorably," etc. - are a little squishy. But "providing our users unbiased access to information" is pretty clear-cut.
The plaintiffs organized against Dragonfly, a censored version of Google that would provide users biased access to information. IMO they've got a pretty good case that the employee handbook, which they had to abide by to keep their job, told them to do that.
TBH, I think almost everyone treats the former statement, as meaning the latter. Did you mistype here?
Maybe there's even something different about using "evil" here, specifically. Would another word have a different outcome?
I don't think so. For example, there are religions that consider the lending of money to be evil, but I am quite certain Google did not have in mind that adherents of these religions should leak documents to the press if Google were to offer a credit card. Likewise, Google was not interested in the moral views of its conservative religious employees when it started offering various types of support for LGBTQ people.
I think when most people hear, "Don't be evil," they understand it to mean things along the lines of, "Don't be unfair to users, don't act with malice, don't lie, cheat, or steal, etc." I.e. don't do things that are essentially universally considered evil. I do not believe many people interpret that as, "protest every time Google violates your personal moral code, no matter how esoteric or idiosyncratic."
I mean, we're getting pretty deep into the weeds of what we mean by, "seen as evil" or even "evil" at this point. Which is kinda what I was getting at. I think stealing is universally understood to be evil, even in the corporate world, but people will differ on what stealing actually is, or whether a particular act is stealing. A recent example that comes to mind is the Citibank/Revlon situation. I personally thought that was theft by Revlon, but there are a lot of people who see it another way. I understand that Revlon's employees did not view their behavior as evil, even if it seemed bad to me.
Nearly everyone is righteous in their own eyes. And adults understand this. That's part of why it's my view that most people will understand Google's former motto to not be inclusive of being an activist against Google's interests, even in morally ambiguous cases, and even after being asked not to. I don't really have any way to convey this more clearly, so I guess we'll have to let time, that great prover of claims, tell. Maybe I'm wrong and the court will hand these people a willion dollars. I don't think so.
A reasonable person should understand it not as requesting to make subjective personal judgments but rather as what it clearly was meant as: "Don't be Microsoft"
I interpreted it more generically as "make the world a better place... by organizing the world's information, and making it easily accessible".
Don't be Evil was basically a kind of jokey collective agreement that Google wouldn't become like Microsoft. Of course twenty years later the industry had grown enormously, Microsoft is no longer the big bad wolf, many working people in tech have no recollection of any of this and in America, exist in an ideological pressure cooker that tells them anything that isn't left wing is "evil". So the motto had been lifted out of its very 90s and software specific context to become a stick for perpetual interns to beat people of the wrong political persuasion.
If this stupidity actually goes anywhere near a serious court case it wouldn't surprise me if this history gets dug up.
The phrase is meant to be a catch-all against policies that are not specified - not a carte-blanche to do whatever the F you want in contradiction of what the company is telling you.
First of all, that's debatable. Even if true, they're wrong.
Having a motto is fine. Asking your employees to comply with a completely vague and subjective objective in their employment contract is asking for trouble, however.
If employees made a good faith effort to follow a vague policy and were fired for that, it seems like wrongful termination to me.
If the company doesn't like the way employees are interpreting the policy, then they shouldn't have such a ludicrously vague policy.
No, the more key part is: “[...] everything we do in connection with our work at Google will be, and should be, measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct. [...] And if you have a question or ever think that one of your fellow Googlers or the company as a whole may be falling short of our commitment, don’t be silent.”
There legal allegation is not that the company action was evil. It’s that it was reasonably within the realm of subjectively questionable conduct that the company had, in a binding contract with employees, demanded to be alerted to when employees had concerns, and that therefore retaliating against employees for their internal action consistent with that binding agreement is illegal.
Exactly, depending on your political viewpoint, "Don't Be Evil" could mean some/all of the following:
- Not doing business with China
- Not doing business with ICE
- Not doing business with any government
- Not doing business with any other business that has currently-employed "evil" (politically incorrect) employees
- Not building ad-tech
- Not building free products where the monetization model involves user tracking
- Not hiring enough minorities
- Not firing "evil" employees (employees who are politically incorrect, who voted for X evil candidate, who don't fall in line with "good" thought/speech, etc)
- Maybe it's evil to do business in China, because it requires you to censor search results.
- Or maybe it's evil not to, because you deprive Chinese people of an important utility, and you don't actually make them better off in any other way.
- Maybe doing business with ICE is evil, because kids in cages.
- Or maybe avoiding ICE is evil, because it's unpatriotic or undemocratic!
Every single one of these actions or inactions could be construed to be evil depending upon one's personal values, moral code, or even one's understanding of various contested facts involved in the decision-making!
When the company publicly says they will do business with China, the vague motto doesn't allow you to refuse to do you job.
The specific direction to raise issues if the company as a whole appeared to be in violation cannot be reconciled with the idea that it did not apply to announced official company actions.
And no one refused to do their job. The question is whether the things they were fired for doing were additional to, outside of, and inconsistent with their job or part of their job as specified in a binding contract with their employer.
There is no requirement for a company to follow principles listed in the CoC.
> And no one refused to do their job.
They refused to stop doing things that were against the CoC, despite being told to do so, and being told that those activities were not consistent with the company's interpretation of Do No Evil.
This case will be thrown out
As will be made obvious by the following comment, I am not a lawyer. But, I always think of the modern judicial system as staying away from saying some particular action is "evil" in the moral sense, rather than just illegal, or even ethically wrong in some cases. I think it would really be something if the court admitted a specific definition of evil for the purposes of deciding on this case. In my view of the world, that kind of thing would need a philosophical or theological basis, which you'd think would then be enshrined, to some extent, in precedent. I doubt anything like that would actually happen in this case, but it would sure be weird if it did.
This case will not hinge on what the definition of "evil" is, but on whether "don't be evil" was a real term of the contract or some errata in the employee handbook. And even then, the complaint isn't "Google was evil" but rather "Google's handbook said to point out evil when I see it and they fired me for it".
This is pretty thin material, specially because they were fired after repeated correction that clarified what they were doing was out of sync with any generic motto.
To me, it's a cash grab masquerading as something more virtuous. They better hope they get a big payout, enough to last them for a long time, because regardless they will be branded as troublemakers who aren't worth the risk of employing.
It was routinely criticized for exactly that by many google critics online.
The employee code of conduct, that they were made to sign as a condition of employment has the directive "Don't Be Evil" in it? Did Google legal review that document? Although often made fun of, there is a reason IBM legal required a license change in JSLint to get out of its "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." license clause. Heck, Google Code wouldn't host JSMin-PHP because of that clause ( https://wonko.com/post/jsmin-isnt-welcome-on-google-code ).
> "movement within Google in pursuit of contractually obligated motto"
is factually wrong, and that's what my post demonstrated. They started a movement that had nothing to do with what "don't be evil" meant. It didn't mean "justice for immigrants."
> "The VP is mad, and gets revenge on you by getting you fired"
Also bogus. This sort of thing did happen, and the security guards were celebrated, not fired. Any VP who tried this would himself (or herself) get fired.
> "The problem here is "Don't Be Evil" is so vague"
Wrong. Contract terms are construed by the law. Since Google wrote the contract, their interpretation tends to govern.
Contra proferentem (Latin: "against [the] offeror"), also known as "interpretation against the draftsman", is a doctrine of contractual interpretation providing that, where a promise, agreement or term is ambiguous, the preferred meaning should be the one that works against the interests of the party who provided the wording.
Ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem
Note that CA has adopted this.
I don’t think “don’t be evil” was part of the employment contract, but if it was, Google would likely wish it weren’t in this case.
This reply is on-point, addresses my immediate suspicion, counters an (assumably intentional) attempt to spread a negative narrative, and is excellently reasoned.
Not only is it not ridiculous, but that employment policies like CoC’s generally constitute binding contracts (which, inherently, bind both parties) is fairly well established in employment law.
That should be Google's problem. It would have been better if they had never stated that intention. They used it to ingratiate themselves to Mozilla and Linux users.
The origin of "don't be evil" had nothing to do with politics. It had to do, especially, with selling search placement, which was something that search engines before Google regularly did. Whether you bought ads on Search or not had no bearing on where you came out in the Search results, and you can doubt that all you like but it was true.
I'm not AS sure about this one, but another evil practice which inspired the slogan was: giving preference to your own products in search results. Google didn't need to do that back in the day, because it didn't really HAVE any other products. It pretty definitely succumbed to that evil once it had some.
If the case is not tossed, the judge will probably construe the term for the jury, similar to how a patent claim is construed. The two sides will fight over the construction, but the judge's ruling will stand. I'm pretty sure he'd construe "don't be evil" by what it meant to Google, and not what the three ex-employees thought. If they were in doubt, they could have asked.
Which, with the slow boil of reducing the yellow background of ads down to next to nothing, then moving them ahead of results, and slowly fading the background to nothing, whittling the little "Ad" chip down to nothing [1], is today exactly what Google is doing.
[1] https://www.webprofits.com.au/blog/google-search-change
> another evil practice which inspired the slogan was: giving preference to your own products in search results.
Which it absolutely does, and did worse (sued in EU over Google shopping results).
I joined in 2010. At no point did I ever drink the koolaid that Google would ever really live up to this vague ideal, but I was, at the time, impressed by how ethical and careful the company seemed to be. That completely changed, little by little, and I lost that trust, or rather, that trust was broken and slowly evaporated. Today, Google is a behemoth that will seemingly stop at nothing to keep that 20% YoY gravy train going. It's getting ridiculous. They're paving over cyberspace with ads and gobbling every profitable thing and potential competitor. They won't be stopping the growth mindset. The self deception at the top is staggering. Google is becoming everything the internet never should have been.
I run an adblocker, unapologetically. Even then, you notice the next level of distortion; the search engine will push you to over-optimized ad-laden, super-dumbed down and aggregated sites that are practically devoid of information but loaded with trackers and spying and ads. Google sends you there because it will inevitably send you to what is in its interest, which is either one of its own properties or something participating in the great ad sideshow, all of which are subject to its tax as the biggest monkey in the jungle.
Completely unnecessary tone here, but yeah, I do think that some percentage of queries for "new computers" might just be interested in finding out what new computers are out there, and not just buy the first thing shoved in their faces. Stupid search engine rounds up 90 or 95% to 100% and forces everyone to think about buying stuff all the time. It's really grating being lumped into whatever crap category the engine thinks is the most profitable and being shown the result of a bidding war for my attention for every. single. thing. in this life.
Some of those things would probably be okay today - now that Mr Zuckerberg has moved the goalposts for how creepy a company can allow itself to get - and everyone must follow or risk losing out.
- "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" - Somebody
- "Most evil are created by those who think themselves as so righteous" - Me
It doesn't really matter what are their intentions. The moment you label yourself as "no evil" ( or Saint ) is the moment some people will absolutely scrutinise the heck out of you. To some ( if not many ) on HN, the act of selling ads itself is "evil".
I will add this Tech / Silicon Valley startup "saving the world" as the force of "Good" started with Google. When the media and PR were hyping Google could do no wrong. Further helping to enhance its image as Saint. ( And possibly good for hiring ). At least I dont see it during IBM or Microsoft era.
It is nice this finally backfire, only 20 years too late. Not sure if I will see the days of things backfire from Apple. I am already old.
Yes. There were 3 top ads and 7 right-hand-side ones in 2008. The top ones had a colored background to clearly distinguish them from search results.
As many others have pointed out, the color's gone, and the ads have run wild.
Would the fact that they were disciplined repeatedly for their actions and told they were unacceptable be construed as guidance that they were out of line with the intent of "don't be evil"? It doesn't sound like they were fired on the spot but rather reprimanded on numerous occasions which Google most certainly documented. This would all be shared openly in a trial which would likely paint a pretty poor picture of the individuals.
How could anything possibly happen other than getting tossed out of court immediately? They want US courts to adjudicate which acts are and are not "evil"?
The complaint centers on a Code of Conduct that the employees signed, and then that the employees were terminated for speaking out internally about what they felt was a violation of the "don't be evil" motto. I'm not sufficiently familiar with California employment and contract law to know how much of a leg this case has, but on a quick scan, one of the counts (discrimination due to sexual identity) is dead in motion-to-dismiss phase, one (slander) might survive if amended, and the other three will turn on whether or not the Code of Conduct's statements that employees should speak up about perceived violations of "don't be evil" is enough like a contract to make retaliation in firing because of it a violation of contract.
Notably, it never asks the court to decide if its acts were or were not evil. It's not insane enough to be thrown out immediately, but there's several facts about the Code of Conduct I'd want to learn about that aren't in the complaint.
[1] This should be standard practice for anyone reporting on legal cases, and it frustrates me to no end that it is not.
No such count exists in the complaint! There is a component of Count V of that type but Count V can stand without it.
That said, the other bits in Count V are also fairly weak, though the sex/orientation/identity one is the weakest.
> one (slander) might survive if amended,
Not sure why you say that; while obviously the facts require trial the slander/false light charge seems to make all the necessary claims to establish the tort.
Defamation generally is a difficult charge to prove, although I doubt that the plaintiffs qualify as a public figure which makes actual malice (the most difficult element) irrelevant. I don't have a strong sense of how much of the elements of defamation are necessary in the pleading stage, especially the degree to which a pleading statement is fact versus conclusory allegation. In particular, paragraph 49 seems rather conclusory on the nature of damages actually suffered to reputation.
In that sense, if the allegation is deficient in the complaint, it's deficient in a way that an amended complaint would easily fix.
If the company says "xyz isn't evil" explicitly, then the motto doesn't give you the right to work against that.
This lawsuit is just childish.
>"There are all sorts of contract terms that a jury is required to interpret: 'don't be evil' is not so 'out there' as to be unenforceable," she said. "Since Google's contract tells employees that they can be fired for failing to abide by the motto, 'don't be evil,' it must have meaning."
Step 2. Deal with thousands of internal lawsuits related to "social justice" and internal squabbling.
If a court could look at a situation and determine that it is evil, then what is the point of determining whether it is legal or not? What if you came to the conclusion that something is illegal but not evil or evil but not legal? You pretty much undermine the construct of law in the first place and the existence of the court itself
Many contract disputes boil down to the definition of the term "reasonable" so why would "evil" be different? Ultimately it's on Google for including the word in legal documents.
Are you treating that as fact?
Obviously I haven't looked at the paperwork for every fired employee (and probably no one will ever get to), but I think they have some other pretext. "<employee> was fired for being evil" is not a phrase you'll ever find.
> Failure of a member of our extended workforce or other covered service provider to follow the Code can result in termination of their relationship with Google.
> don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
The reverse here is that the employees are allowed to quit. Google isn't trying to sue any employees for "being evil".
>But the plaintiffs' lawyer, Laurie Burgess, said it is not beyond what courts regularly must decide.
Sounds like the lawyer is taking them for a ride on their dime, imo.
They basically say don't be evil was part of the employment contract (via the code of conduct), the employees fulfilled their obligation to advise Google not to be evil, and then Google fired them.
From wikipedia:
The elements of promissory estoppel are:
* an express or implied promise;
* detrimental reliance by the promisee foreseeable to a reasonable person in the promissor's position;
* actual detrimental reliance by the promisee (worsening of their position); and for specific performance (as opposed to reliance damages), injustice can only be avoided by enforcing the promise.
Point by point:
* Google promised to not be evil because every employee (including the CEO and members of the board) agrees to the code of conduct.
* The promisee (employees) relied on that when they made their decition to work at google and enter the contract. That was reasonably foreseeable by the promissor (Google).
* The employees actually did rely on the promise when they took the job, and circulated the petition to not be evil, since they were promised all employees agreed to it. No comment on the specific performance remedy since I didn't read that far to see if that's what they're demanding.
Obviously there's points in there that could be reasonably debated, but it seems not-crazy enough to make it past a motion to dismiss.
If something seems like a dumb case mostly designed to enrich the plaintiff attorney on the face of it, it most likely is a dumb case mostly intended to enrich the plaintiff attorney.
"Don't be evil" falls pretty neatly under the definition of an illusory promise because it is "indefinite or vague."
Under the Restatement (Second) of Contracts:
"Illusory promises; mere statements of intention. Words of promise which by their terms make performance entirely optional with the “promisor” whatever may happen, or whatever course of conduct in other respects he may pursue, do not constitute a promise."
The fact that the plaintiff attorney did not mention the concept of an illusory promise does not bode well for its chances, because the judge will certainly bring it up, and the defense will also certainly bring it up. This should have been addressed directly, since it is the most obvious defense to this claim. There are other defenses as well that were not brought up and addressed, such as that the nonsense claims related to media articles had any bearing whatsoever on any alleged breach of contract.
Notwithstanding this, "Don't Be Evil" should have never been in any official code of conduct; it should have stayed in the realm of puffery to avoid exactly this type of problem. This is why everyone hates lawyers and other assorted 'fun police' personalities. This was a lazily written complaint that did not really get into the important nitty gritty of why these particular employees were injured.
Further, maybe this is one of those California things that lets you get out of arbitration, but these employees are almost certainly bound by an arbitration agreement. Not mentioning why you get to dodge the forced arbitration clause in your contract in the complaint is annoying to the court and will also make it less likely to survive the obvious motion to dismiss due to the binding arbitration requirement.
Probably this?
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
>(f) Nothing in this section is intended to invalidate a written arbitration agreement that is otherwise enforceable under the Federal Arbitration Act (9 U.S.C. Sec. 1 et seq.).
Google employees to my knowledge usually get lassoed with arbitration agreements. Not unheard of for plaintiff attorneys to sell clients who are bound by arbitration on a lawsuit that cannot survive the motion to dismiss on that basis.
If your contract stipulates that you (and your employer) should "do no evil" without supplying a definition for "evil" then it really isn't that much different to any other contractual breach. Also, you'd have to be stupid to put that in an actual contract.
Assuming she's not on contingency, or getting paid by some external group.
>The issue is that, before the 2008 global financial crisis, Goldman had gone around saying things like “our clients’ interests always come first” and “integrity and honesty are at the heart of our business.” Then the global financial crisis occurred, and:
> 1. It came out that maybe Goldman’s clients’ interests sometimes came second, and maybe integrity and honesty were sometimes not quite at the heart of its business[1]; and
> 2. Goldman’s stock price went down.
>[...]
>Perhaps in 2007, investors read in Goldman’s disclosures that “our clients’ interests always come first” and “integrity and honesty are at the heart of our business,” and they thought: “Yes, it is good that Goldman has integrity and puts its clients’ interests first, that is valuable for its business, we will buy the stock.” In 2009, after Abacus and so forth, investors thought “alas, no, Goldman does not have integrity and does not put its clients’ interests first, we are disappointed, we will sell the stock.” In other words, perhaps investors ascribed value to Goldman’s statements about integrity and honesty, and then when they found out that those statements were not true that value went away and the stock went down.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-06-22/money-...
The case isn't asking a US Court to find that. It is asking a California State Court to find that challenging corporate involvement in a particular federal action on the same moral grounds that the State of California was challenging the underlying federal action at the same time was reasonably either or a combination of (a) within the ambit of an obligation undertaken to raise potential “evil” actions, or (b) legally protected political activity, or (c) legally protected discussion of working conditions.
(And there's a couple other things in it that could succeed even if those all fail, notably the slander charge about knowingly false information spread about involvement in public leaks.)
However, even given all of that, I do not believe it is possible for Google to exist without being complicit with the overall purpose of CBP.
I don't see any particularly salient dividing line between generically working with them and not.
There might be something evil about the details of the particular project, but if CBP as a whole is evil, I don't comprehend how working with them automatically makes a difference when you are based in the US anyway.
I can swallow "a US court adjudicating which acts are evil" much easier than "a US court adjudicating which major parts of the US government are generally evil".
The latter seems like some sort of propaganda fantasy, a snake eating its tail.
The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.
Stalin [insert very bad historical person here] could have certainly utilized reason in the course of pursuing evil actions for example. The scope there is narrowed down to specific actions. If you broaden back out, you can say that Stalin is acting irrational by committing heinous acts in the first place, but that's only the case if you're defining the standard of what is good on his behalf (as opposed to what he may consider good to be). You'd be imposing your standard, the foundation of your morality, on him.
Morality depends on first defining the standard of what the good is. From there you can extrapolate the rest, you can construct a system forward. Stalin and I will disagree on the standard of what the good is, and as such we'll reach different conclusions on a lot of things. From his standard, he can take rational actions, make rational decisions that align with his aims - they're rational as it pertains to what he's pursuing, what his standard is.
One can entirely disagree with the standards that someone else holds, of course. Their behavior may be evil by your standard for example, and vice versa. You could argue that there is one objective standard for The Good (thus everyone else not following that is immoral to the degree they diverge), however good luck convincing most people to go along with that (it'll never happen).
Is putting these people in a gulag rational? Well that depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
In this case, the tossing out would be along the lines of "the facts alleged in the complaint are, even if true, insufficient to let you bring this lawsuit" (or, more succinctly, "failure to state a claim [upon which relief can be granted]").
Whether an act is "evil" is a theological question, so to the extent plaintiffs are actually relying on the word "evil", separation of church and state will prevent the court from even considering their claims.
[Most?] atheists have moral codes. Yours is not necessarily mine. Sorry to be pedantic, but implications of atheist unity really bug me.
The aliens observing our supposed primitiveness are just the ones that came out on top in their latest civil war and went out exploring using the technology that the 14,000 years of war cultivated.
Maybe they're the most obnoxious, spoiled, entitled assholes you could ever imagine. Luck rolled their way ten thousand times in a row and they act like it.
There's absolutely no good reason to default to believing aliens are likely to be far more enlightened than we are.
There's no good reason to imagine some civilisation has figured out how to cross the vast interstellar distances and then pop in to see us during their lifetime.
Since we are already in the realm of pure fantasy, it doesn't alter the argument's validity to also assume these magical creatures are enlightened.
If you go back a couple hundred years and talk to the people then I imagine you could achieve a similar effect. They were just as certain they were correct as we are, and they are just as wrong.
Whether challenging an act is within the reasonable scope of a contractual obligation to report suspected evil is, however, not a theological question, and does not involve deciding the question of whether the act is, in fact, evil, whether or not that is a theological question (it is not, necessarily, it is a moral question.)
There is a Wikipedia article about something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem
I mean, I like the effort, but... it's unlikely that an employer is going to want to pay employees to do things they don't want to have done?
"Her suspension began just three hours after she published a piece of code that created a pop-up notification when Google employees visited the website of IRI Consultants"
I'm curious how one even gets chrome to monitor and pop up a notice when google folks visit a website. If it was some kind of ad that seems OK. If she used google's infrastructure to push a popup to all google employees... do other businesses permit this? Can a chase employee push something to all chase.com users alerting them to something they care about?
Google's revenge will be to display those reasons every time a potential employer google's their names.
Kind of funny seeing maybe some google naivete and the "do no evil" thing come back to bite google.
When I was in high school I had a fair bit of fun going outside the permitted guidelines. By college I'd developed a reasonable sense of boundaries with other folks equipment / jobs with a trust element.
If I pushed a pop-up notice out company wide with a message my employer didn't approve of, I'd definitely be expecting to be going out the door rather than doing the litigation process.
Having worked a bit in govt interesting to see the NLRB pursue this, in govt my experience was a REDICULOUSLY dim view would be taken of something like this.
If it were relating to anything other than labor organization, it would be a no brainer. But there are special legal protections for labor organization, so I not sure it's clear cut in this particular circumstance.
There are a lot of employee-written extensions at Google, published in an internal Chrome web store. I even wrote one in a few days and published it. Some of them are owned by teams in one way or another, but a surprising amount of developer tooling at Google is somebody's side project.
Surely if they can prove they didn't leak anything (or Google can't prove they did), they would have an easy wrongful termination lawsuit? They wouldn't need to sue on these flimsy grounds?
This sounds like a stunt someone who hadn't gone to college yet might pull, but this person was a google engineer in a position of trust / authority - not sure how the google hiring process works but she made it in.
I mean, no business is going to willing let one employee hijack the browser used by their users to spread a message the company doesn't like. Most businesses make this very clear - you can't use company resource to spread your messages (political, MLM, side hustles, religious etc).
It's interesting to me that we fell for this at the time. I mean if someone says to you at a party "I'm a nice guy" well it's obvious they're a bloody monster...but a corporation doing the same thing and early noughties me is like "well that sounds nice".
This has been official policy. It seems like more than a motto at that point.
Plenty of people don't subscribe to the belief that it's evil to detain people illegally entering a country. Try overstaying your tourist visa in another country: you'll be arrested, then deported. Same deal with doing Pentagon contracts, as mentioned later in the article. Not everyone subscribes to the belief that any defense-related work is evil. I seriously doubt that this will even be allowed to get to court.
This lawsuit seems more like activism than a credible legal challenge.
The code of conduct or a motto is not a contract. The code of conduct generally limits the conduct of the employee, and does not create obligations for the company. When "Don't be Evil" is in the code of conduct, it only suggest that the employee should not engage in evil behavior, but doesn't preclude the company from doing so, and doesn't implicitly allow all non-evil behavior by the employee.
But not the same things the ex-employees are protesting.
I guess it's subjective.
There are some people with the org that would genuinely debate you as to whether making a profit (any kind of profit) is a good or bad thing.
It's pretty unreasonable for somebody to say "I personally think this is evil so I can't be fired for refusing to do it, even though I'm the only one", but it's a lot more reasonable if most people would agree that it is in fact evil.
I could see a judgement for the former employees if Google were helping an authoritarian government identify and punish dissidents. Working with US customs? Probably not.
Does it form “a contract” then? Because that’s what the suit in the article is alleging, by my reading.