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.