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Comment by shantnutiwari | Hacker News Reader

yeah, looks like some history rewriting.

9 years ago was 2017-- and by that time Google was already doing sleazy SEO shit, scanning peoples emails to who them ads, trying to make ads seem like general search results etc etc

Google was *exactly* this company it is today

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The "Don't be evil" motto was diluted in 2015 when alphabet was formed, and taken down in 2018, so yeah, things were brewing from before.

Morals only matter when they restrain someone from doing something beneficial to themselves.

Absent a stake in the outcome, it's just virtue signaling.

And when Google was forced to choose between juicing ad revenue and its morals, it chose the former.

The author of this article disagrees:

> “Don’t Be Evil” wasn’t just a slogan of often-referenced Googliness—it was a north star for teams making hard calls.

It definitely counts for something that at least one senior leader felt the slogan was relevant for decision making.

The author is not cynical enough.

Do you going around telling people how virtuous you are? No, good people just try and be good.

The slogan was a red flag right from the start.

That sounds pithy, but a person doesn't need to remind themselves of their own values; a company of 200,000 people does.

Which isn't to say cynicism for these sorts of company charters isn't warranted, just not for that reason.

I agree.

But the moto has always lacked any aspiration about how they should do good or make the world better. “Don’t be evil”. Who thinks they are being evil? No one.

At the beginning of Google it meant "we will not be like Microsoft" and it was good marketing.

This is the relevant historical context to understand how this ever got into big G's mission statement, it was to distance themselves from the then well-known anti-competitive mal-practices of the Redmond giant.. which seemingly they've learned a lot from. Don't no-one worry too much, they only have less than half of the world population's messaging metadata, schedules, realtime location and private pictures.

It was purely self interest don't piss off people so that regulators break our monopoly. Once the monopoly was challenged it became less important.

They aren't cynical, just disingenuous.

Google was providing cloud computing to the DoD before 2017 - there's no real morale difference between providing lower level compute vs providing a higher level AI algo other than giving yourself an excuse by adding one layer of abstraction (obfuscating?).

Very convenient to suddenly decide it's enough after collecting a massive paycheck for 10 years.

Most people that one would describe as evil do not see themselves as evil, but rather see what they're doing as justified. Saying you're not going to be evil means literally nothing.

Don't be the bad guy, ok, but if you think your goals are noble enough then crossing lines becomes acceptable. Google sold everyone on the "we're going to change the world for good and improve everyone's lives and make all information accessible and free" line, and in doing so justified everything else they did - privacy invasion, monopolistic behavior, etc.

The fact that they said "don't be evil" should have been a massive red flag for everyone, not a green one.

The villain in every James Bond film thinks they're the hero.

Exactly. Everyone who posts here regularly believes themselves to be “not evil”. Working for Google, Facebook, burning resources to produce ai slop, etc.

Not me of course. I’m making the world a better place by introducing ai into your Facebook feed.

And it was just something that some guy said in a meeting

That’s quite a bit different from helping to kill people.

Let’s not lump every ethical issue into one. And not conflate SEO sleaze with aiding murder.

Except Google works with the Pentagon and the Israeli government so yes they are helping kill people.

...which is one of the changes that prompted the author to resign.

Project maven was 2017 which is when the author joined.

...and then they left that project because employees objected. Now employee objections just get the employees in trouble.

Yeah, I think since it's getting provably worse no matter where you start the clock everyone can claim this whenever they actually do leave.

Just to give one example, you have the Google founders bending the knee to Trump these days whereas when Trump started his first term you had articles like this:

"Google co-founder Sergey Brin joins protest against immigration order at San Francisco airport" (2017)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13512063

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