(Tongue in cheek)

Tim Ferriss asked Eric Schmidt about it when he interviewed Eric, and Eric said that one concrete example was adding location sharing in Google Maps. Engineers wanted a way for people to set up a fake location to hide their real location for their own privacy, because not giving basic privacy rights to people is evil.

First Eric thought that it's just a feature with too much extra work, but later the lawyers at Google realized that it also makes the legal part of data handling and protecting data from governments much simpler, because it makes that location not personally identifiable information.

So yes, it may be profitable for small companies not to be evil, but for engineers who said them over and over, it doesn't mean don't be poor, it has nothing to do with money for them.