> As I said, it's less about the specifics of what they're doing now, and more about the apparent switch of focus from "organising the world's information" [0] to "deliver[ing] online experiences tailored to each individual's interests and social circles"
I don't see these as divergent. Information about individuals is information, too, and needs to be organized. It also affects how the rest of the information is organized.
> And it's obvious many people within the company are uneasy about this too (and do, arguably, think it's wrong)
> Does this mean "Google" thinks itself to be evil? Well it becomes meaningless to talk about Google as a monolithic entity at that point because it's made up of individuals.
It also becomes meaningless to get that granular, doesn't it? Does Google have to not be evil in the eyes of every one of its employees?
> But here we have an institution. People build institutions. We can build it in such a way that's it's likely to fail, or build it in such a way that it wont. Surely you can see it's important to make it as easy as possible for Google to do the right thing and difficult, if not impossible, for them do the wrong things.
Could you describe in what ways you think Google is building an institution that leads them inevitably toward doing evil? Maybe the part I don't understand is what lies at the bottom of the personal data mine. Is it a matter of how much data they collect? What they do with the data?