When you think about the power Google has, Don't be Evil is still a real value of theirs, and we should be grateful.
Most people won't even let themselves imagine what could be done with Google if evil was an option. How many hours would it take to compile a list of everyone who searches for incest porn and correlate that with 'people who are judges'. Considering that the incest fetish runs as high as 10% such information could be used to perform a bloodless coup. Call the legal system nullified, and lobbyists obsolete.
And that is just one facet of the simplest way Google could be used for evil (blackmail). There are infinite ways Google's information asymmetry could be exploited, and most of them would be completely invisible and 100% effective.
Thats why I'm glad we have Sergey and Larry running under the banner of "Don't be Evil." It shows that even from the beginning they realized they were going to wield terrible power, and they were a bit honest with that fact.
What? I don't believe Google is evil, but at the same time, I'm not "grateful" that they're not evil any more than I'm grateful that a driver isn't evil and doesn't run me over. Yes, I'm glad, but I don't feel like she's going beyond what she owes me.
This perspective is subtly dangerous, because it takes the consumer out of the decision-making process. When we see Google as an amorphous blob of power we're grateful to, we've already conceded the right to set the terms of the marketplaces we engage in.
Individuals should be concerned about the state of the marketplaces they frequent. There are great reasons for simple rules and regulations. Except for the ideal case, individual incentives differ with the incentives of those the market serves.
For clarity, I love markets. The market is the most powerful tool society has ever developed. But a lot of the benefits of a very free market are lessened when the number of suppliers is small. In truth, how many companies do what Google does, even on a specific product other than gmail? A handful of search engines?
The point at which google is doing us a favor by not being evil, instead of merely abiding by the law, is the point at which our expectations should be updated.
Exactly right. They've made a choice but it's a choice that they benefit from by getting people to use their products. It's not something they're doing purely out of the goodness of their hearts the way an anonymous donation would be (that would be something to be grateful for).
By their nature, almost all economic transactions in a free market system are mutually beneficial to both parties or the transaction wouldn't take place. That does not mean that many companies do not make short-sighted decisions that harm themselves, their industry, and customers over the long term.
Here is a small list of examples which might serve as examples where decisions eventually hurt the company itself rather than only customers:
- early refusals to sell music, movies or television shows online
- highly inconvenient DRM strategies
- "closed software is more secure", and other non transparent practices
- cost cutting measures by manufacturers that reduce a product's durability in ways that are not obvious in the store
Google could monetize the information they can mine from their users more aggressively. They could also more actively depart from standards, such as by removing IMAP access to Gmail or requiring some proprietary plugin for Youtube. We'd be worse off, and Google would lose a lot of users and ad-viewing eyeballs. That still doesn't mean that it is a given that they would make these decisions. Facebook seems to have little reluctance when it comes to changing user agreements in non-obvious ways for the purpose monetizing their data, I switched from Yahoo mail to Gmail eight or nine years just because of IMAP, and Microsoft tried to push Silverlight for video content.
Even in the case of a cooperative game where mutually beneficial choices can be determined, that outcome is not always the result. What's wrong with being grateful that Google (at least some of the time) has apparently chosen such strategies? Claims that their benefit is somehow at the expense of users confuses the situation with noncooperative games, and suggests that Google would be better off not making the decisions that have benefited users, too.
We really don't do anything without it making us "feel good" on some fundamental level. Motivation/intrinsic reward for behavior goes to the very core of our being as self-directed organisms. So asking "how is donating any less selfish than not donating" is asking the wrong question. We have evolved to take pleasure in behaviors that are beneficial to ourselves. One who is selfish will take pleasure in things that are solely beneficial to him or herself. One who is unselfish has a reward system that is aligned with the benefit of others. So when we say someone is a "good person" or "unselfish", we are really judging the alignment of their reward system as being more suitable for a social environment.
As an aside, note that this way of thinking is compatible with determinism: while the murderer may not have any more control over his anti-social behavior than the altruist, the person is condemned for having a brain wired in such a way that is toxic to a collectivist society.
Yes, I'm glad, but I don't feel like she's going beyond what she owes me.
Nobody owes you anything by default. We might agree to mutually abide by rules not to harm each other, but you are not owed anything for free.
This is part of "free markets", and indeed used to be part of being a citizen of a country; the country provides you with various things in exchange for things you give up such as some freedoms, some money, and perhaps other things too.
Given the norm of people being completely self-centered these days, and being proud of it on top, I think altruism should be applauded and encouraged whenever it happens.
As I read the OP's comment my first thought was "I know what he means but 'she owes me' is probably not the best way to state it". I think you ran off on an unnecessary tangent about the term "owes". The point was "I'm glad she doesn't run me over but that's something we should expect vs be grateful for given we'd like the same courtesy applied when we're on foot"
In what way is "Don't be Evil" a value of Google's? I mean, they're not going to get up one day and start shooting children with sniper rifles, I guess, but that's not their business anyway. Their business is making tons of money by collecting information both public and personal, and accruing power and influence for the benefit of their money-making as well as for the personal gratification of their top executives (because that's what people do). Do you think that when they see an opportunity to further one of these two goals the Googlers say, "but before we do that, let's stop and think long and hard about the ramifications of what we're about to do, and whether that action can be considered evil?" No, they don't. They do it, and then, if it does turn out to be evil, they explain why it really isn't. They wouldn't do it only if so many people would consider it to be evil that it would turn into a serious PR issue for them. So really, "Don't be Evil" is a motto at Google, but it's not a value. Their true value, if corporations can even have such a thing at all, is "Don't be So Conspicuously Evil That People Hate Us and Stop Trusting Us With Their Private Information or Too Afraid of Us To Let Us Benignly Spy On Them All the Time".
And as for blackmail, who's to say it's not already happening? But even if the Googlers don't personally blackmail anyone to advance their own goals, how hard would it be for a crime organization to put a Google employee on their payroll? I don't know what kind of security they hav at Google, and chances are it's the wrong kind[1].
Ignoring that i disagree completely about what Google's business actually is,
"Do you think that when they see an opportunity to further one of these two goals the Googlers say, "but before we do that, let's stop and think long and hard about the ramifications of what we're about to do, and whether that action can be considered evil?" No, they don't. "
Actually, yes, this is pretty much what happens almost all of the time. People think long and hard about the ramifications about what they are going to do.
That doesn't mean they always come up with the "right" answers, or that there isn't vehement disagreement, but yes, they do in fact, thing long and hard about it, and whether it is the right thing to do.
" I don't know what kind of security they hav at Google, and chances are it's the wrong kind[1]."
As you said, you have literally no idea what you are talking about.
That doesn't mean they always come up with the "right" answers, or that there isn't vehement disagreement, but yes, they do in fact, thing long and hard about it, and whether it is the right thing to do.
And so the definition of behavior that would qualify as "evil" varies even within Google itself, making the motto even squishier.
Of course it varies, but that doesn't change anything about the value.
You really think the moral values of right and wrong are completely consistent across people?
The reason it's a corporate value is because it's part of the culture.
There is an actual conscience at the company, and you try to hear, understand, and deal with concerns people have, internally and externally. You try to do the right thing, for the right reasons.
The fact that you may not always achieve this, or that people may disagree on what the right thing is, changes nothing.
The outside problem is that most people think "Don't be evil" means "don't do anything I <the user> morally disagree with".
This would be a pointless value, as it would be both impossible and meaningless to achieve at any scale. There are plenty of moral values on which large populations of people have diametrically opposed views. For example, from the perspective of a large population of people, Google's stance on gay marriage is evil.
Suppose for a moment that Google really is as benevolent as you believe. You yourself admit that they do have a lot of power. In a democracy, we try not to put too much power even in the hands of an elected official. Isn't it a problem that so much power resides with a corporation? Should society trust Google's good intentions?
But I even have doubts about Google's benevolence. What, a company that adopts a "don't be evil" motto is less likely to be evil than a company that doesn't? I'd be suspicious of a person that feels the need to declare that he'll do his best not murder anyone. By adopting the motto, Google had acknowledged the fact that corporations do tend to do evil. But is it because they intend to do so? Do chairmen and CEOs wake up in the morning all giddy about doing some evil or naughty, harmful, mischief today? Even Bernie Madoff didn't start out like this. And yet, corporations do evil in spite of people's best intentions. So Google said: we'll try to be careful. That's actually not bad, because I hope that that slogan makes the Google executives aware of the temptations and pitfalls that await all big firms. But I do not for a second believe that Google's executives are so much better than all other good people running large corporations that actually do evil. Because, hey -- power corrupts.
Nobody likes getting up one day and realize they've become a Bond villain, so they don't: that is, they just don't realize it. Also, nobody really is an actual Bond villain (well, Hitler). Even good people do bad things. My point is, people do need a little help from the outside to protect them from themselves, and with that much power, Google needs a lot of help. Google has become a big problem.
It's not clear what you are suggesting with the power questions.
Breaking up Google?
As for whether society should trust Google's intentions: I hope not. Society should be, in general, distrustful of corporations, and, for the most part, they are. That doesn't mean Google doesn't have good intentions, or that one should assume bad faith everywhere. At the same time, what was questioned originally was the operation of that corporation and it's people, and that's what i responded to :)
As for the adoption of the motto: The original outside publication of this was done while going public, and was intended to make clear to wall street that Google wasn't going to maximize profit at the expense of everything else, where everything else usually involves doing morally questionable things.
I think you read way too much into it.
"But I do not for a second believe that Google's executives are so much better than all other good people running large corporations that actually do evil. Because, hey -- power corrupts."
All I would say to this is I hope you get to meet them some day. Except for one, I can say they really are better than all the other good people i've met running other large corporations. They are honestly good people, and honestly care about doing right.
In the end, I guess we just disagree. I don't believe Google has become a big problem, and I don't think Google needs a lot of help from the outside to protect them from themselves.
In fact, I think help from "the outside" would make things a lot worse.
For example, the last time I looked, the outside wants Google to try to detect when people are doing bad things, and report them.
they really are better than all the other good people i've met running other large corporations.
Good, so they'll understand that no one, no matter how "good" should have this much power.
I also think that Barack Obama is better than most other politician, and that the US will be much better off -in the short term -- if he were allowed to operate without hindrance from that pesky, annoying, inefficient Congress that's just slowing him down. And yet, checks and balances are a good thing in the long term.
Augustus was a great ruler. Certainly much more efficient and benevolent than the senate. But he did effectively bring the monarchy back, and many of his successors weren't as good as him.
what you are suggesting with the power questions. Breaking up Google?
Yes, although we probably have a little more time (a couple of years, probably) before this becomes absolutely necessary. Also, we need regulation on companies holding personal information:
- Limitations on what information can be kept.
- FBI background checks on all employees with access to private information.
- Top notch cyber security (I'm sure Google does that; no complaints there)
- Maximum physical security, like access to private information only from certain, constantly monitored physical location.
the outside wants Google to try to detect when people are doing bad things, and report them.
Google doesn't oppose reporting on people because it's evil; they're opposed because it would be really bad for business. And while I do share Assange's concern about government surveillance, I'm much more horrified at the prospect of surveillance by a corporation.
I don't have time at the moment to reply substantively to the rest, and I don't want to shortchange.
However, I will address one thing:
"Google doesn't oppose reporting on people because it's evil; they're opposed because it would be really bad for business. And while I do share Assange's concern about government surveillance, I'm much more horrified at the prospect of surveillance by a corporation."
This is false.
I have first hand knowledge of why we oppose it. We oppose it because it's evil. It is bad for business, but that is secondary.
Good. So you probably understand why amassing so much power in one corporation is evil in and of itself, even if the the people at the top have good intentions at the moment (whatever that means - I'm not sure most people share the same definition of good intentions).
The intentions of many influential people in government, including those at the very top, are not in the least bit less noble than those of Google's executives, and yet, while they may not always like it, they understand the necessity for checks and balances. Power must not be concentrated. Concentrated power is either evil, naivety or ignorance. It can never, ever-ever, be good, though it might have the appearance of good for a short while.
> In a democracy, we try not to put too much power even in the hands of an elected official. Isn't it a problem that so much power resides with a corporation?
No, it really isn't. If you pretend for a minute that Google is a hive mind, with a single individual in control of its actions, it still doesn't have a power to match the federal government of the US, or even the President (who is a single elected official).
You keep going down this track and pretty soon you are arguing that you can't have capitalism and democracy at the same time.
> But I do not for a second believe that Google's executives are so much better than all other good people running large corporations that actually do evil. Because, hey -- power corrupts.
The Don't Be Evil principle is actually a check on precisely this concern. By having it as a principle, it invites the executives to be challenged on this basis by everyone in the company. That is the entire point. Having a motto Don't Be Evil doesn't magically change the nature of your executive team. What it changes is how that team is challenged.
One problem is that it's a slippery slope. Effectively, the ethic would appear to be that anything and everything can be done/implemented as long as nobody involved calls it evil.
1. That isn't a slippery slope. A slippery slope is where once you start something, you can't stop it as it slowly erodes. In essence, once you start something down a slope, it will roll all the way to the bottom.
There is nothing about what you have said that demonstrates this is a slippery slope.
Maybe you meant to make the argument that once something is okay, you start down the path to everything being okay. This would be false, since outcomes, reactions, and viewpoints of previous things are raised when new things happen.
It's not a court where once a ruling has been issued, that is the rule.
2. I'm really trying to understand your concern here, but, as written, seems to boil down to "if everyone is a bad person, bad things can happen". Since I assume this is not what you are trying to say, could you elaborate a bit?
To expand on what DannyBee said, it can be a valid form of argument to say there is a slippery slope leading from A to B, but it turns into the "slippery slope fallacy" when it's not obvious how A necessarily turns into B and the possibility of a middle ground isn't acknowledged.
Each decision builds a foundation of a status quo, defined as the sum total of the "this is not evil" decisions and designations made in the past, which constitutes a form of momentum (especially among those who don't want to rock the gBoat).
This momentum is a force that affects the value system of the company's implementors and gating roles. It boils down to "bad things can happen even if everybody thinks they're working for good." Myopia becomes a bigger problem the older a company gets.
But for the reasons i've explained, it does not do this, and this is not how it operates in actuality.
Maybe if the company had no turnover, no leadership changes, no nothing you could make this argument, becuase it would always be the same people.
But it's not the same people, and even where it is, nobody sits around and asks "in light of us deciding this wasn't evil in the past, is it now okay to do X".
That's not the question to be answered. It's not "is this evil in light of us having done similar things in the past", it's "is this evil".
Don't get me wrong - The past is evidence, and data, for sure. It would be stupid to ignore reactions, viewpoints, etc.
But the world changes, decisions look different in hindsight, society changes. If there was no evolution of thought, you would be right. But there is.
Hey, when you find that world where what is "evil" is so damn absolute that there needn't be any thought or debate as to what course of action would avoid doing evil, can you pick up a unicorn for me? I could use one.
Larry and Sergey have the majority voting power, and they have veto power over product changes :)
But that's probably not what you meant, so i'm going to assume you meant give "non-preferred stock holders veto power over product changes".
I'm not sure what this would accomplish, since institutional investors are not exactly who you want deciding the fate of products. Timeline wise, they are too short term of thinkers. Ethically, they are often very suspect.
Strategically, most lack the knowledge to make the right decisions, and even if you gave it to them, they lack the experience.
What you are suggesting is almost identical to hiring a large set of outside consultants, bringing them into a well-functioning company, and letting them veto every product decision at the exec level or below. Worse the consultants would be experienced in say "women's shoes", and the company would be one that did something like "making airplanes"
I'm pretty sure i know where this leads, and it isn't "don't be evil" :)
All of your examples don't fall under the category of "Don't be Evil" but rather "Don't do anything Illegal".
Apple equally could ship every iPhone with a keystroke logger and a C4 explosive to detonate every time someone typed Android. Or Microsoft could modify their browser to record bank logins and secretly steal 1c everyday from their customers.
The point about "Don't be Evil" was to not do anything that was immoral but legal. I would consider Google's support of Motorola's behaviour in abusing FRAND patents to be an example. Or Google's deliberate ignoring of the Do Not Track advertiser setting.
Google also avoids paying tax on its huge UK earnings by shuffling the money between countries. That's presumably legal but it certainly isn't moral or ethical.
Obviously Google is not the only company that does this. Apple and other capitalist corporations do the same thing. But it's one thing to run a company based on naked greed and quite another to claim that you're somehow superior.
To be fair, corporations legally avoiding as much taxation as possible is a bit of a stretch for the evil claim. Corporate ethics wise it is more interesting why consumers want corporations to pay more tax as it effectively increases prices.
A better question would be posed to our governments on tax reform and simplification. But we all know the loopholes exist somewhat intentionally, otherwise they would have been closed already. The fact they're not getting closed indicates that our perception of what a company should pay and what they're legally obligated is basically wrong.
why consumers want corporations to pay more tax as it effectively increases prices.
Simple. When was the last time you bought a 787 jet, tractor, industrial window washer or ordered 1000 tonnes of concrete ? People want ALL corporations to pay more taxes and are fine if the few products that they do buy are a tiny bit more expensive.
The fact is that most 'adults' understand that taxes pay for essential services such as education, infrastructure and health care. And during the tough times we live in aren't happy those services are being cut whilst corporations are making huge profits.
Remember this is people's day to day lives we are talking about.
Sure but my general question remains. Why do we denigrate the actors that are working in their own interests based on the incentives as given, when the denigration is the tax codes, and implicitly the people that create the tax codes that are the problems?
I'm not arguing that paying more tax isn't inherently beneficial towards the state(s), but if the incentive is to avoid the tax, and it is legal, I fail to see the problem at all from the viewpoint of the corporation.
> I fail to see the problem at all from the viewpoint of the corporation.
You're right, as long as the corporation doesn't mind if the public see it as a bunch of greedy, grasping, evil corporate bastards.
In Google's case, its "selling point" is "Don't be evil" and its business depends on trust. It's rapidly losing that trust.
For the record, Google's UK turnover in 2011 was £2.7bn, and based on its profitability, it's making about £676m and should be paying more than £180m in tax in that one year. In fact, it has paid a total of £10 million between 2006 and 2011 on revenues of £11.9bn.
If Google was a moral, ethical company then it would pay taxes that cover the cost of doing business in the UK, where it benefits from UK government expenditure on maintaining the country as a good place to do business (roads, schools, health services, police etc).
Essentially, Google is using fancy international book-keeping to defraud the British public.
But we must take account of the numbers. As Orwell might put it, 'some tax, good, more tax - double plus good'. Not exactly true is it? On the whole, (and this is not a zero tax argument) the following from Milton Friedman seems a truism to me.
“When a man spends his own money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about how much he spends and how he spends it.When a man spends his own money to buy something for someone else,he is still very careful about how much he spends, but somewhat less what he spends it on. When a man spends someone else's money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about what he buys, but doesn't care at all how much he spends. And when a man spends someone else's money on someone else, he doesn't care how
much he spends or what he spends it on. And that's government for you.”
>Corporate ethics wise it is more interesting why consumers want corporations to pay more tax as it effectively increases prices.
Because taxes (help) pay for the negative externalities that arise from the corporation doing business.
>A better question would be posed to our governments on tax reform and simplification. But we all know the loopholes exist somewhat intentionally, otherwise they would have been closed already. The fact they're not getting closed indicates that our perception of what a company should pay and what they're legally obligated is basically wrong.
The problem exists because of the international tax framework, and getting the governments of all the jurisdictions involved to reform the tax system is harder than a single country unilaterally doing so - especially when it greatly benefits some countries at the expense of others.
Agreed, I'm not saying tax reform will be easy. Just noting that blaming corporations for exploiting, though thats a bit of a loaded term, perhaps advantageously utilizing existing tax structures is a bit naive. The incentives currently mean a corporation would be wrong to ignore tax breaks, that coupled with for example the corporate tax rate for money repatriation in America for example means that less tax income is generated at current law interpretation.
Basically is 35% of 0 dollars better than 10% of N dollars? In the US that is effectively our current dilema is it not? Our tax rates for certain things are so high people have no incentive to get double taxed in two disparate countries so they leave the money outside of any taxable entity. Improving the incentives to bring money back would seem to be a no brainer as it is a bit of a win/win situation to both sides.
As to disparities amongst countries, I'm not sure there ever could be a solution outside of some overreaching treaty agreements. Past that I'm sure there will always be a Caymans willing to lower their costs at the expense of the rest.
One solution to avoid the need to coordinate between countries is tax access to markets, meaning just use VAT. Of course there will be a need to collaborate on equal taxes between states.
But as people said here the loopholes are probably deliberate.
I think most people would agree that where the line gets crossed is when products bought in one country e.g. UK have taxes applied in another country e.g. Ireland.
I read once that there was a debate or something in UK about tax avoidance, and the official stand was that if a company can find and exploit a way to reduce taxation, they are entirely in their right to do so. Can't find the source though.
Eh, it's kind of like saying "I'm grateful that the hospital staff made me well instead of carelessly and greedily making my condition worse".
I think many people in this thread are forgetting that Google is a conglomeration of different people, opinions, etc., and it may not be as easily defined as the paranoid attributions given to the tangential predictions of one of its executives.
If Google really wants to "not do evil", they should actively work on removing themselves from this position of power they have. They should also work on making it impossible for any entity to obtain this kind of power. That is certainly a very difficult task, but there are little things that can be done and would make a difference (real support for freenet, bitcoins, or wikileaks).
Just gathering power is evil, because in a few years the temptation to use the power will be too strong.
Also being a public company complicates the strict "Don't be evil" logic. Shareholders, in general, doesn't care about being too ethical in a metaphysics sense.
It's time to think that private companies has a most promising ethical future than public ones.
I think you can only say that, if you measure this on a spectrum, they only have a wider potential range of evil:good. Any conclusion about clustering would be founded on an utter lack of data.
Don't be Evil is still a real value of theirs, and we should be grateful.
[...] and most of them would be completely invisible and 100% effective.
You realize that these two sentiments are inconsistent? If Google could be evil without anyone knowing it, then you have no way of knowing that they are not evil.
The minute that anything even remotely resembling that happens, you will find the full force of the federal government and every possible legal resource come to bear on Google. The hypothetical that you stated isn't just related to judges, it's relevant to the most powerful people in the world.
Which is precisely why it won't happen. The people in charge at Google understand this existential threat and that is why every feasible cultural and technical safeguard exists to prevent this from happening.
That's assuming the government or certain agencies like NSA wouldn't already try to get Google to abuse that power in their favor, and be a very willing partner for them.
But the thing is Google has been one of the companies that has actively fought the hardest against such government abuses.
Others on the other hand are more than willing to do it. How long did it take Microsoft to brag to the Chinese authorities that they are on the Chinese government's side, just so they can gain 1% market share if Google was banned from China? A whole week? What about the partnership to create the surveillance tool that is TOM-Skype?
So yes, I think we could do much, much worse than Google.
So Microsoft is opportunistic. Big deal. Google was equally quite happy to "brag to the Chinese authorities that they are on the Chinese government's side" as well in the past. They just maybe didn't understand the implications of what they meant.
Yes. We could do much, much worse than Google. We could also do much, much better. But the fact is that every company is complying with the basic tenants of the law and that is all that anyone can expect of them really.
"And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness."
Blackmail? try political suppression instead: there are many countries around the world that would shower google with money in exchange of information regarding dissidents.
Right now many countries in south america maintain armies of paid bloggers dedicated to smear the opposition 24/7 in social networks. This is incredibly labor-intensive, costly and not always that effective since even the dullest individual can see through the obvious propaganda copypasta of those hired guns.
If google wanted it could just charge those governments to shut the opposition from its services and give all their data from emails to files and social activity to the local police, which would put it to use right away with a devastating effect.
I think there is a good case to be made that we would have much stronger privacy laws if evil actions were more aggressive and obvious. The judicial and legislative bodies of the country will not put up with blackmail or attacks for long.
One of the problems with advocating for stronger privacy protections now is that so much of the harm is hypothetical. It takes urgency and crisis to pass legislation, and Google (and Facebook, and others) have done a good job preventing crises.
"and most of them would be completely invisible and 100% effective"
...
You realise that would mean they could be doing this right now? :P
Personally, I suspect they're not as I assume at least one person would have enough backbone to challenge them over it, so I don't think it's something they could legitimately get away with.
If the only qualification for not being evil is abiding by the law then jay, Google could be considered not to be evil. As long as their tax evasion practices are deemed legal that is.
But that is just a reflection of the low moral standards Sergey and Larry have. Instead of imagining what they could do if they committed senseless stupid evil on irrelevant perverts, imagine what they could do if they would actually do good.
They wield a terrible power, and worse the faceless public owners of Google wield it with them. If they truly were good, then the world would be a different place from what it is now.
Didn't they already change the world in a very positive way? I mean they've given access to information and cheap computing to everyone for free, including the third world.
Google access to information can be used for evil. But it takes only very small step to have the same thing reclassified as good. Take your example and let's say some eager attorney general declares war on obscenity, gets some laws passed by bleeding-heart think-of-the-children lawmakers and asks Google for data, which Google can not and will not refuse since it's not for evil - it's for the ultimate good of the children! And bingo, you just facilitated totalitarian state, where all you do online is now recorded by the government and can be used against you if they dislike it. And with the best intentions.
Let's face it, "Don't be evil" is nothing more than PR. Great PR, but still nothing more. Very few people actually do something they think is evil. Usually they only do what they had to do, or what they were ordered to do, or what the situation made them to do. And I have absolutely no doubt Google will do the same, and will if needed find reason why anything they do is not evil. Any of us is capable of it and Google is no exception.
True, but it's not in their interest to blackmail people.
If people knew people who were being actively extorted in relation to their google searches then everyone would switch to Bing or DDG in a second.
It's really not just your google searches though - every site you visit that runs adwords is reporting your info back to google - just visiting a site directly can leak info, regardless of searches. Search history is obviously the low-hanging fruit, but Google's tentacles reach pretty far.
They needn't have the desire to blackmail anyone. Collecting the information makes it available to the government who will do the profiling and blackmailing.
People who don't believe in inherent human rights, apparently. If there's something to be gained by being evil, Google will be evil. Maybe not under Sergy and Larry, but Google will live on after they die.
I am never in full agreement with Julian Assange, but Google has in recent years, shown their disapproval of privacy. Eric Schmidt's 'if you have nothing to hide' ideal expresses quite clearly - to me - the fundamental problem in his - and by extension, Google's - view on data and users.
But I must confess, that Julian Assange seem to be rather well spoken. And language wise - at least - it was a rather joy to read. Seemingly unlike the book he was reviewing.
This particular misconception of Eric's words really annoys me because it's blatant misrepresentation. What's more, the press (who area always looking to create controversy in the interests of page views), only mentions half the quote. Full quote [1]:
> I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities
Google is subject to the laws where it operates. Just this week a judge compelled Google to comply with warrantless searches (ie National Security Letters) [2]
Any sane person should.
For anything you do online you should ask yourself this "what would your reaction be if this were made public?" The gist of Eric's quote is that what you may consider "private" just isn't due to changing company policies (eg Facebook's continued privacy snafus), bugs, the courts and the legislature.
There is a good lesson in this. Just go to bing.com/social and search for "cheat exam" or similarly embarrassing terms to see why treating the Internet as public is a very good idea.
Disclaimer: I am a Google engineer but the views expressed are my own and don't represent my employer.
I don't see how it's a misrepresentation. Schmidt could have left out, "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place" without changing the substance of the rest of the message.
Has he issued a clarification elsewhere that contradicts the parent's interpretation? He could, easily.
Yes, he could have, without changing the substance, but it's a misrepresentation because the context makes pretty clear to a lot of folks in a way the original does, and they removed that context.
The oft attempted interpretation of the original quote is that Eric doesn't believe anything should be private online, and that anyone who wants privacy must be doing bad things.
As the context makes clear, his point was more that for better or worse, things generally aren't private online, and even if they wanted it to be, plenty of retention is legally required.
I've read the quote several times and while it does say that things generally aren't private online it also clearly suggests that you shouldn't be doing things that you don't want other people to find out about which itself suggests that anyone wanting privacy is doing "bad" things.
The first part implies that they're bad, even with the additional context. If there are other quotes that make your point cleanly, I think they'd be more convincing evidence.
> I've read the quote several times and while it does say that things generally aren't private online it also clearly suggests that you shouldn't be doing things that you don't want other people to find out about which itself suggests that anyone wanting privacy is doing "bad" things.
I found it's surprising that you interpret the quote this way. Here's my interpretation: privacy on the Internet is an illusion.
It may suggest TO YOU that "anyone wanting privacy is doing bad things", but that is not what was said, and it is not what was implied. Maybe you're projecting?
Let's try a hypothetical parallel. "If you really don't want to go to jail, maybe you shouldn't be smoking pot in front of American cops." See how in my statement, there's no value judgement about smoking pot, and there's no value judgement about wanting to stay out of jail, there's just an observation about the realities of the world. This is NOT the same as "only bad people want to stay out of jail", nor "only bad people smoke pot", NOR EVEN "only bad people want to smoke pot and also stay out of jail". It's just "people who want to smoke pot and stay out of jail may be at the mercy of forces beyond their control."
I have no idea what Eric actually thinks. Maybe he does actually think that privacy should be outlawed or some other hilariously socially-unacceptable belief. But in the much-quoted quote, he said nothing of the kind. Protestations to the contrary are simply "I want to believe he's evil" paranoia.
Except he didn't say or imply that you should do those actions in a different context, he said you shouldn't do those actions at all.
Why didn't he say, for example, "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know then don't publish it publicly and non-anonymously and don't use a cloud service like Google."
I haven't seen him say anything that would suggest that he holds an opinion different than the popular interpretation of the quote in question. And you would think, given the criticism, that he would have taken the opportunity to correct that interpretation if it was not what he meant.
> changing the substance of the rest of the message
It most definitely changes the substance. From Google being the perpetuator of the said privacy problem, it becomes a participant that is legally bound to participate by YOUR legal system.
Are you required to keep search logs? Are you required to correlate searches with users? It seems like it's the choice to retain and analyze those that puts you in the position of having to turn them over.
DDG doesn't do that. It's a participant in the same legal system.
And what about the quote two paragraphs down where in 2012, after knowing about how the previous sentence was interpreted, he again said, "if you don’t have anything to hide, you have nothing to fear"?
My recollection of this is that he was clearly joking at the time, but you are talking about a guy who gives the same speeches and talks hundreds of times a year, and it only takes one time for someone to take stuff out of context and present it badly.
I think if you met Eric you'd realize he's just another hacker who ended up becoming a CEO. If he was posting here, he would be indistinguishable from most people in terms of his views, concerns, etc.
That's fine, and it may very well be the case. But I don't think that the rest of the quotation is so profoundly different that just posting the first sentence misrepresents the quote.
It sounds like you're saying that the first part of the quotation doesn't accurately describe Schmidt's views on privacy. I don't know him, but, sure, most people have more than one sentence's worth of opinion on most issues. :)
Did he say that? The only reference I can find to that comes from a PC World story[1], which appears to not only be a paraphrase (presumably of the original quote), but it links to an article about keeping your facebook profile cleaned up for people searching for dirt on you and doesn't quote Schmidt or even mention him.
His words betray a naive understanding of how humans choose to harm one another. For example high school students have been beaten to death for being gay, or bullied into suicide for geeking out about online gaming. Martin Luther King was investigated and harassed by the FBI and CIA; now there is a statue of him on the National Mall.
> If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.
No. There are things that we all do that are moral, ok, and even legal, that can be used against us. Privacy violations enable that.
The thing is, in context of the whole quote, this is all about illegal activity very specifically. The larger point was that Google isn't allowed to be a confidential friend of yours by law, even if it wanted to be. You think Schmidt isn't aware of MLK and the "it gets better" campaign? You can take any sentence out of context and make a person seem cruel and unthinking.
Look carefully at the whole quote. He treats the collection and retention of data by Google as a fixed reality that everyone needs to work around--despite the fact that he was Google's chief executive at the time and had the power to set or alter those policies.
U.S. law does not require this collection or retention of data; federal access is a consequence of Google's policies, not a cause.
I don't think Schmidt is cruel. I do think that like many ambitious people, he has a blind spot for conceptions of the world that conflict with his goals.
Given the extent to which large multinationals can and do fiddle the accounting to end up recording profits in the most advantageous tax jurisdictions, it strikes me as somewhat significant that they don't do the same over privacy issues.
Would it be technically or legally impossible to partition data between different privacy regimes? I realise there isn't a pressing consumer awareness of the need, and hence cost, but it does bother me a little that "my" cloud data is controlled by the nationality of the service, rather than my own.
The matter is hugely complicated with CDNs, multinational infrastructure, etc, but there's some unease about ceding control to a legal system in which I have very no or little power to effect change. Especially one which has a taste of the power which modern data-vacuuming can provide, and seems unlikely to give it up.
What you just described is why there is an increasing need for a global government. When companies span continents, they can pick and choose which laws in what countries suit them best, and the citizens of every other country the company inhabits are powerless to stop it.
No. Global government is not a logical requirement to combat these behaviours. For example, enforced transparency and regulation with harsh punishments (perhaps based on agreements between nations) could effect the same, without the horrible risks of centralizing power.
Reading the full quote, it still seems to fulfil my original vision of his ideal. Sure, it is phrased less clearly, but if his intent is to describe a warning to people (which is totally commendable), then he should have phrased it as one. His 'maybe' describe a carelessness to the issue, as if he doesn't care.
Although, I do have my own ideas about how much Google actually care about my privacy, hmm...
I think the point was that you could directly search for people who were about to cheat on their exam. It's a pretty disingenuous example since you could do exactly the same thing on Google: "cheat exam" site:twitter.com or just directly on Twitter.
For anyone who doesn't know, the title of this article is a reference to Hannah Arendt, a political theorist who made her career covering the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. She coined the phrase 'The Banality of Evil.' This was in reference to the idea that people will follow the orders of authority figures even if they conflict with personal beliefs.
Interestingly in this interview between Assange, Cohen and Schmidt, which was linked elsewhere in the comments, Schmidt was actually the first one to say the phrase "the banality of evil". [1]
pg has written about some Milgram Experiment[1] on The Perils of Obedience[2] which actually seems to comfirm this idea that people will follow the orders of authority figures even if they conflict with personal beliefs.
I suspect if the authority figure says "Our motto is don't be evil, so do as I say and it's not evil since we do no evil", compliance would be even better.
It just struck me while reading this and I'm probably just reiterating something that was better put by somebody smarter than me, but:
The correct response to "Why do you care so much about privacy? Do you have something to hide?" is: "From whom?".
If you define privacy from the wrong end, you end up with the wrong conclusions. The important question isn't "What do you feel comfortable sharing?", but "How come so many parties have curious interests in what I'm sharing?".
Of course, if you are google, phrasing the question as "think about what you want to share" makes it so that in answering the question, people basically follow a path that is profitable to you. With that, they focus your suspicions on the wrong end of the conundrum.
Yes of course, you should be careful about what you do anywhere in public and yes of course people have lessons to learn with the internet. But it's not as if humans are completely removed from the basic concept. In Medieval Times, people didn't run naked across the market thinking nobody would see them. Treating people as though the most important thing was to educate them about not posting naked pictures of themselves online (or whatever makes a better example for "you shouldn't be doing it in the first place") means infantilising them.
No. The question is: Who is so curious about what I do online. Cui bono!?
Google most definitely profits from hyperfocussing people on themselves. Just like websites do SEO to present themselves in their best way to the search engines, we now want humans who make themselves presentable, easy to index entries in the databases of our society.
I agree with some bits, and Julian Assange is a compelling writer, but he is too cynical. It's surprising that someone who would embrace the democratizing power of consumer technology by way of Wikileaks would be so skeptical of the exportation of that very same technology. It turns everyone into both a producer and consumer of information, including (and especially) him. It establishes a more perfect marketplace of ideas and is therefore the enemy of authoritarianism and closure.
I think you missed the point. The "pure" technology has democratizing effects, but as soon as you mix government with technology you get "controlled technology" or "regulated technology" of sorts. Which is very, very dangerous from a personal freedom standpoint.
In today's world, how much does your government know about you (or can get to know about you) via digital / technological means v/s the other way around?
Point taken, but in many cases the exact same information available to the government is available to all of my friends and every random Joe. Most of my web and email communications, like those of many people, are protected by RSA encryption and the last I knew no government has yet enough computational power to efficiently break RSA. They can subpoena Google to get my emails but they could do that 10 years ago, too. Whereas before there was total information asymmetry between the government and its people (the government knew far more about the people than the people knew about each other or the government) the Internet has more or less obliterated that asymmetry. The government can take measures like installing backdoors (and of course I agree that this shouldn't happen) but overwhelmingly the tide is pointing in one direction: towards informational equality. In those cases where there is a serious attempt by the government to regain its foothold over our information, it's not consumer technology that's the problem it is legislative overreach.
If you think the internet has obliterated informational asymmetry you reallty haven't thought much about the issue - the internet and IT has literally revolutionized surveillance, transforming the states ability to keep tabs on an extremely limited set of high value targets into one where nearly every citizen is surveilled by state emchanisms many times per day. The Inyernet certainly doesn't give the public the ability to analyze all of the telephone calls out of the state department or anywhere close, just as one simple example.
Assange and Stallman overlap on a lot of this content really. Stallman is about liberating technology and Assange is about liberating information.
I think it's clear that this is the future Google wants. If they occasionally have to hand over documents to the government, that's just the price of optimizing the lattes for the rest of us. If you don't like personal information lying in the hands of third party corporations and powerful officials, you have a first world problem.
What I am waiting for is a foundation focused on privacy. Our digital lives should be no one's rummage sale. The foundation would create software to make social networking truly controllable and private. No ability to read my private messages, no mandate to make money from me, no personalization, no backdoors.
This largely echoes Assange's views on the book, in longer form.
The good news is that, thanks in part to this superficial and megalomaniacal book, the company’s mammoth intellectual ambitions will be preserved for posterity to study in a cautionary way. The virtual world of Google’s imagination might not be real, but the glib arrogance of its executives definitely is.
Previously, Julian Assange met with Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Schmidt and Cohen had requested the meeting to discuss ideas for their book, "The New Digital Age".
I clearly get the impression that Eric Schmidt and Sheryl Sandberg are grooming themselves for public office.
If people think their influence doesn't extend beyond "the technology industry", consider what it would mean if they ran successfully (and didn't pull a Meg Whitman).
I watched the interview video with Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen on the NYT site this morning and then read some of the reviews of their book on Amazon. Apparently the book is heavy on foreign policy with little advice on preparing for the future in a business sense.
As much as I sometimes enjoy free services from Google, FB, Twitter, etc. I also think that people like Julian Assange and Richard Stallman have an important message and warning for maintaining some control over personal data and our computing infrastructure.
In the video interview Eric Schmidt makes a point that they want people to opt-in for 'Google total information awareness' (I am using that term, he didn't). I make an informed decision on what information I will share but most of my non-tech friends (who are representative of the general public) do not.
Part of me likes a smaller world via the Internet, communicating with people with similar technical interests no matter where they live, and G+ and Twitter are great for this. On the other hand, I would also like to see a local network, possible centered around my town's library, that is effectively local to the small town I live in. The technology (encrypted VPN) is straightforward for implementing private group communication.
I'm being forced to look at ads that I don't want to see which contain products that I neither want nor need. And this is being perpetuated as "the business model of the internet" by Google, creating an excuse to pervasively (often perversely) invade privacy, you know, "so the ads are more relevant."
How do we classify that? Is it not evil? Given the basic premise, I can't imagine anyone classifying it anything but.
Should be titled the Banality of Google Strawmen for the often repeated conspiracy theories of Google working with the NSA.
Assange, who was on the cypherpunks list (as I was in the late 80s/early 90s), should know better when he writes something like "The advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism. This is the principal thesis in my book, 'Cypherpunks.'"
He clearly was present for the Clipper chip fiasco which showed the state's fears over cryptography in the hands of private citizens, and the central tenet of cypherpunks was a belief that modern, unbreakable, cryptography could defang the state's ability to invade privacy. Back then, the big debate among 'punks was stuff like untraceable assassination markets using BitCoin-like distributed money in which police and the state were powerless. Anarcho-capitalists were salivating over how in the future people would be able to share and communicate with no intervention.
Point being, if you want privacy guarantees, truly want certainty, the technology exists to secure it. He was in fact, part of a movement aimed at providing the software to do it and make it easier for the average person. His experience on WikiLeaks shows how one can keep secrets from the state, even the US Government.
How one goes from the idea that cryptography presents the opportunity for undefeatable privacy, anonymity, confidentiality, etc no matter how much the state is against it, to, voluntary use of Google is the death of privacy, I don't get.
Now, I never believed that cryptography alone could overcome the state, but a lot of cypherpunks did. But there was a huge intersection between cypherpunks and libertarians, who would take the view that people have the right to trade their personal information and that there is nothing evil or bad about organizations offering to make that trade.
I also think people are too fixated on Google, when VISA/Mastercard, your Bank, your phone carrier, and your ISP have much longer, more comprehensive, and detailed records on your behavior that the police can, and have, been monitoring far longer and with less oversight. Remember Carnivore? Do you trust Comcast? I trust Google more to fight for privacy of my data against the government, than any of those organizations. After 9/11 AT&T practically rolled over for the US government. When a crime happens, the police can subpoena your email, but the reality is, they obtain your phone and financial records first. Google's stock price would go to $0 if there was a serious breach of trust, the company is built on that. AT&T or Comcast are not built on love of their products.
Google's "Don't Be Evil" motto is not about perfection, it is a value, a gradient, that you strive for. As Assange alludes to, Google culture is made of a mixture Silicon Valley graduate student culture, the hacker ethos, etc. The company chock full of 10,000+ people who believe or have internalized these values to some extent, whether you believe they are deluded cultists, or naive, that's how folks feel. There's simply no way Googlers would tolerate something like secretly sending user data to the NSA, it would be too hard to prevent internal employees from revolting. As an employee, I'd rather Google lose money and stock price and have the government shut them down, than send a firehose feed to the NSA.
>Should be titled the Banality of Google Strawmen for the often repeated conspiracy theories of Google working with the NSA
>How one goes from the idea that cryptography presents the opportunity for undefeatable privacy, anonymity, confidentiality, etc no matter how much the state is against it, to, voluntary use of Google is the death of privacy, I don't get.
For one, Google doesn't offer any cryptography (except HTTPS, which doesn't matter on their side). For the billions that use it, they might have no privacy at all.
What's that hard to understand?
>I also think people are too fixated on Google, when VISA/Mastercard, your Bank, your phone carrier, and your ISP have much longer, more comprehensive, and detailed records on your behavior that the police can, and have, been monitoring far longer and with less oversight.
Because there are others doesn't mean Google is not one of the top offenders. As for what VISA/Bank/etc has, are mostly purchase lists and inferred whereabouts (very crudely). As for the ISP, with HTTPS that most sites use, they don't have much. I don't think they MITM Google, Facebook or your Bank.
Google, on the other hand, with their Search, Docs, Gmail and Android (which also includes GPS location data), has almost everything there is for an individual that uses it.
>Google's "Don't Be Evil" motto is not about perfection, it is a value, a gradient, that you strive for.
It's a naive marketing slogans for the press and the daft -- people have got over it for at least five years.
ISPs don't need to MITM your HTTPS, traffic analysis logs are very valuable to the government, because they give them a list of IP addresses of services you access as well as access times.
So, even if the government doesn't know what your online pseudonyms/usernames are, they can contact those services with traffic data to narrow it down.
You can downplay financial records if you want, but phone and finance records are the number one lead generation sources. And the government runs a "total information awareness" system for financialized behavior: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fincen that no one seems to care about, while they all worry about the government seeing their search logs for porn and cat gifs.
Here's a question for you: How many Americans were mistakenly put on terrorist watch lists because of information web service providers collected vs information from FinCEN?
Look, I'm not saying, don't worry about your data in cloud services being subpoena'ed. What I am saying is, worry more about the already existing firehose feeds the government gets from ISPs, phone companies, banks, and airlines. The government has to have a warrant or NSL to get Google to hand over data on selective accounts. But do you know what is going on in FinCEN and classified FBI and NSA monitoring with those other organizations?
The attention span of today's geeks seems woefully narrowed to only the stuff they know: social media cloud stuff, and precious little is said about the massive monitoring of traditional sources of service information.
> There's simply no way Googlers would tolerate something like secretly sending user data to the NSA
It doesn't matter if employees would tolerate it: phone company employees wouldn't tolerate it either but the cell phone and location records of every American were too much for the authorities to resist - the great majority of phone company employees have no idea about the data that is handed over to government.
Google has a very deliberate policy of building a comprehensive record of searches, websites visited, comments, articles, private documents written, people collaborated with and communications - all linked to your real name and phone number. It doesn't matter that employees wouldn't tolerate giving it out, sooner or later some governments will pass laws giving them access to the data. The fact that Google is building the records is enough.
Google employees already object - look at Vint Cerf's confusion when asked about the real names policy.
To paraphrase Chris Morris: But who's to say a government with an authoritarian streak in a time of national crisis will pass a law giving the secret services access to those records?
The point is, Google as a company opposes giving the data, it fights it tooth and nail. It does not have a policy of cuddling up to governments to curry favor by handing over data, and most of the NSA conspiracy theories are completely unfounded.
Sure, the government can use kangaroo courts and send goons to get the data, but there is nothing special about Google in this regard. They can also send G-Men to get your bank accounts, school records, health records, telephone records, safeway history, DMV records, IRS tax records, credit card accounts, library or blockbuster rentals, and tons of vital information about your behavior that Google does not have.
Nothing has changed, so if you want to stop this from happening, demand better government. Sitting around whining about Google, and then when push comes to shove, not doing your duty as a citizen, is not going to change anything.
If Google disappeared tomorrow, you'd face the same privacy issues, because simply living in a civilization creates a public paper trail, it is unavoidable. All that's different is that it's digital now, and we're networked.
Chances are you make phone calls over unencrypted mobile. The NSA could, at their perogative, intercept and transcribe every phone conversation you have. They don't even need Google. People need to fight to restore civil libertarian protections by rolling back the Patriot Act, NSLs, NDAA, and other stuff that's happened since 9/11. Trying to demonize Google will be ineffectual to the root cause.
My point about Google culture is that any attempt to put a Carnivore-style tap on a Google data center would run a very high risk of whistleblowers making it public. AT&T isn't exactly known for their Googley culture, but Mark Klein blew the whistle on the NSA/SBC/AT&T firehose tap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
> The point is, Google as a company opposes giving the data
That's great and much better than some of the other tech companies who silently hand it over.
However Google doesn't oppose collecting the data, it doesn't seem to worry about the implications of that for oppressive regimes or future radical laws enacted after the next big terrorist attack. Are there real objections within the company to the real name policy? Is it addressed by management?
Demanding better government is, of course, important. I spend a lot of time and money doing it - working with citizen lobbying groups, contacting my representatives and attending meetings. But you can't demand better government and ignore how one of the biggest corporate collectors of personal data is acting, and changing.
"A single unified beautiful product" - linked to your real identity (to set a positive tone "like when a restaurant doesn't allow people who aren't wearing shirts to enter") - and one that doesn't interoperate with other products because they're "milking off of just one company for their own benefit".
That seems to be the core of Google these days and it's very different from the company many Googlers joined.
> It doesn't matter if employees would tolerate it: phone company employees wouldn't tolerate it either but the cell phone and location records of every American were too much for the authorities to resist - the great majority of phone company employees have no idea about the data that is handed over to government.
Some of them do, but shut up about it. It is a fact that AMDOCS (an Israeli owned company with alleged Mossad links) does outsourced billing for most major telcos in the US and many in Europe.
What I don't get is: it is theoretically possible to build at least some technologies that offer anonymity together with personalization. Google don't seem to do it.
Is it because they tend to support the government position that we need this data to fight terrorism? Or because they think that I'd they'll use such technology, the government will change the rules forcing them to use the less private tech? Or just plain profit maximizing - do the easiest thing that will bring the most money?
> How one goes from the idea that cryptography presents the opportunity for undefeatable privacy, anonymity, confidentiality, etc no matter how much the state is against it, to, voluntary use of Google is the death of privacy, I don't get.
Because ordinary people don't understand the implications of using these services. Every single person is surprised at what the government gets access to with an NSL, subpoena, etc, as evidenced by the Petraeus case and the several cases investigating reporters.
Again, the proper course of action is to educate people to demand changes in the state, not to call what Google is doing evil.
It's like saying that a company that provides paper, pencil, and mail delivery is building the greatest instrument for evil and authoritarianism, because it becomes a channel the government can intercept.
Every technology has upsides and downsides. That the state exploits the downsides doesn't make the provider or inventor "evil".
"It's like saying that a company that provides paper, pencil, and mail delivery is building the greatest instrument for evil and authoritarianism, because it becomes a channel the government can intercept."
This is such an utterly disingenuous argument. I'm becoming more and more convinced as time comes on that analogies have no benefit whatsoever and just become a tool for people to warp the argument into something else.
I don't think it is disingenuous. Any company that creates a new communications channel increases the surface area for government to intercept. Any company that creates a service which you interact with, with high frequency, creates a log of behavior for the government to intercept.
The only difference with modern web portals is centralization, which allows the government to seize it in one chunk, vs distributed amongst N different organizations, but that's really only marginally more secure, because the government has no problem bulk subpoena-ing all of the major service providers.
The only real protection is to use pseudonymity everywhere and to never reuse a pseudonym between two different services.
Silicon Valley has its roots in serving the government in the war effort back in the 1940's, so I agree that it's not really realistic to hope for a separation between the two entities. They are very much in a symbiotic relationship.
So, you think there is a logical connection between the companies of the .com era, who cut their teeth on the sharing of animated cat pictures, and those who built computers to calculate artillery tables?
There's no denying that government military funding helped kick off Silicon Valley, as did DARPA and the Internet, but to say that means today's entrepreneurs in the valley are apt to serve military war interests is pure guilt by association, and a weak link at best.
> but to say that means today's entrepreneurs in the valley are apt to serve military war interests is pure guilt by association, and a weak link at best.
They are as "apt" as anyone else, which is to say very; The government wields big carrots and sticks.
At some level, we all just accept that there are things we don't understand, and we accept that we will just act in disregard of our lack of knowledge.
Should we all be paralyzed to walk around because we may step on the last of some species, destroying something forever? Well, no. If it turns out that everyone did that pretty much on the daily, we'd all be surprised but we'd probably not stop walking places.
Similarly, just because I walk in public without doing everything in my power to keep surveillance from seeing what I'm doing doesn't mean it's the death of privacy. It just means I don't care.
For me, I and the rest (or the majority) of the world will gladly trade some information about the knowledge we seek for that same knowledge. It's just a no brainer.
Again, the problem is that ordinary people do not understand what they are "giving up" and therefore can't make an informed choice. But we can get a sense of how they feel but the fact that they universally surprised when the data stored on them is made concrete in some way. My sense is that if that people were given a presentation about all the information stored about them specifically and what can be inferred they would come out "pro privacy".
>I trust Google more to fight for privacy of my data against the government, than any of those organizations. After 9/11 AT&T practically rolled over for the US government. When a crime happens, the police can subpoena your email, but the reality is, they obtain your phone and financial records first.
I do commend Google for some of the good they have done but I think you are overselling Google way too much here when it comes to trust. They were a part of a trade group that backed CISPA. We shouldn't forget either the numerous privacy issues that Google has had. The last one was getting fined for bypassing Safari privacy settings.
While you have also mentioned many companies, some fairly and unfairly, Google has services that are aiming to compete against all of them in an attempt to gather all the information they can. Google isn't "evil" in this regard but I don't think anyone believes that one company having their fingers in so many pots is a good thing for user privacy or the internet in general.
> I trust Google more to fight for privacy of my data against the government, than any of those organizations.
Why?
> The point is, Google as a company opposes giving the data, it fights it tooth and nail. It does not have a policy of cuddling up to governments to curry favor by handing over data, and most of the NSA conspiracy theories are completely unfounded.
>How one goes from the idea that cryptography presents the opportunity for undefeatable privacy, anonymity, confidentiality, etc no matter how much the state is against it, to, voluntary use of Google is the death of privacy, I don't get.
Ah, the "you have a choice" argument.
Absolutely. You have a choice. I have a choice. I used my choice. I razed my Google account to the ground and scorched the earth over it several years ago, because I was fortunate enough to discover just how completely abusive our relationships with Google actually are.
The problem is that most people do not have that fortune. The problem is that Google is a billion dollar monopolist industrial player, with an enormous public relations and marketing budget, and the power to cause itself to be perceived as a big friendly giant. At I/O recently, it literally paid for favourable coverage with free hardware given out to all of the "tech journalists" who attended. And the result was 50+ articles on the main tech blogs all frenziedly discovering how wonderful Google was. There was a complete absence of a critical perspective.
Most people are not fortunate enough to know how dangerous it is to put your whole life into a foreign corporation's servers sitting on the other side of the planet. They do not realize that the consequence of a whole society doing this is to create the incentives for a less free society. And they do not realize that the moment they become "interesting" - such as if they become an activist - all of this technology becomes a weapon against them.
Given that they do not realize that - as I once didn't - they sign up for these services. They are given a false impression of how safe they are. They have a choice - yes - but they do not have all of the necessary information to make that choice in an informed manner. Google gives them that choice under false pretenses. And after several years of using it, if they do become aware of it, it is much harder to leave. They feel, "ah, it's too late now, I have to live with it." When it is not and never is too late.
The "they have a choice" argument you make is as about as nuanced as the theory that everyone in a "free market" is a "rational actor." Yeah, in no-space. Not in the real world. And that's why people get screwed. Assange's argument - and I agree with him - is that we are all getting screwed by Google. The fact that that royal screwing is the consequence of a symbolic choice made under false pretenses is not really a forceful counterargument.
>I also think people are too fixated on Google, when VISA/Mastercard, your Bank, your phone carrier, and your ISP have much longer, more comprehensive, and detailed records on your behavior that the police can, and have, been monitoring far longer and with less oversight.
For any one of those examples, it is false to say "more comprehensive and detailed" I think. These industries gather information on you in order to do their business. Google's business IS gathering information on you. When you take into account content, social graph, IP access logs, search history, browsing history, and all of the other stuff that Google voraciously gobbles up - which is increasing - any one of those industrial players is dwarfed in terms of the data it takes.
Taken all together, yes, they give a very detailed picture of you. That's the point. And everyone should be aware of it, and Google is a primary culprit.
It's also worth pointing out that Google very likely will attempt to replace each of those industrial players with a service of its own, and in some cases already has.
>Google's "Don't Be Evil" motto is not about perfection, it is a value, a gradient, that you strive for.
It's a marketing slogan. It is also phrased in the imperative. I have wondered more than once - as evil after evil is discovered being perpetrated by Google - whether it is Google's memo to itself, or Google's message to the world.
Google's real name policy was evil. Google's aspirations to "tame" the internet is evil. Google's evangelizing political correctness is evil. Google's mission directive of gathering all information is evil.
I don't care if each crop of comp sci students fresh out of university waltzes wide eyed through Google campus telling itself it'd blow the whistle on any evil it saw. I don't trust those people to know evil if they see it. When you consider how completely banal people like Sergei Brin's conception of evil is:
"[Google Glass] are, uh, a new form of computing, uh, that’s designed to really free you."
...it is possible to have a lot of sympathy with the title of Assange's essay.
Google I/O is a developer conference and they give out free hardware to attendees, the majority of whom are hopefully developers, in order to get them to develop on their platforms. They give free review units to journalists for evaluation which is pretty standard practice. They don't "buy" positive articles.
For example, most reviews of the Chromebook Pixel, acknowledge it is a very nice, well built machine, but then turn around and list all of the reasons you shouldn't buy one: price, limited capability, similarly priced MacBook Air, etc. So much for free hardware buying rave reviews from tech journalists.
Google is perceived as a friendly giant because it mostly is a friendly giant. If you compare it to other corporate actors, like Microsoft who just handed over patents to a patent troll, it is a much better corporate citizen. Sure, it isn't perfect, but your conception of Google is delusional.
> Assange's argument - and I agree with him - is that we are all getting screwed by Google. The fact that that royal screwing is the consequence of a symbolic choice made under false pretenses is not really a forceful counterargument.
I, for one, have never been screwed by Google. I get a great deal of value from Google, and in return I see a few ads once in a while. I see nothing wrong with that.
> evil after evil is discovered being perpetrated by Google
What are these evils being perpetrated? I see a lot of handwaving and "what-ifs" in here, but nowhere do I see concrete examples of Google fucking people over.
The fact is that anybody with power can abuse that power. What if all of the police officers in the USA decided to shoot all the citizens? Should we dismantle the police departments because they could abuse their power?
False. When Google is legally permitted to, they notify you of requests for your records. They also publish all such requests in aggregate in the Google Transparency Report.
I always know when I have been shot by a police officer.
I do not always know when my data has been copied even with your assertion of Google's good will. Your conditional of "when Google is legally permitted..." is quite telling (information is fluid and ephemeral) and makes your contradiction, "False.", laughable.
The case of personal data privacy and control is categorically different than the case of physical violence.
I submitted this good IMHO read couple days ago [1]. Whats interesting is that at that time, Google Chrome was not displaying "website ahread contains malware". but now it does. Can someone confirm that there is a malware indeed?
I was summarizing MIRI's reasoning about how to ethically build Friendly AI as "Don't be a jerk" before I even heard what Google's motto was. I think it's a perfectly good motto and an inspiring one.
The problem of various "revolutions" is that we no longer have great leaders. There are influental leaders, but none truly great ones. Just like with music bands, we no longer have The Beatles or The Queen.
I struggle to name three great present-time politicians.
In the absense of great politicians, any post-revolution cabinet degrades into tyranny of mediocrity or fails to work at all.
The problem of various "revolutions" is that we no longer have great leaders. There are influental leaders, but none truly great ones.
Good. We don't need "Great leaders", in the sense of how most people use that term (that is, political leaders). We just need people to be free to do what they do best - live, love, learn, play, grow, work, build, create and dream without arbitrary restrictions and constraints imposed through force.
Having "leaders" who "lead" by being influential, outspoken, visionary, etc. is another thing. I'd call somebody like Elon Musk a "leader" in this regard, but he isn't forcing anybody to do anything.
I'm not a big fan of Nick Saban, but back when he was coach of the NFL's Miami Dolphins he was asked once about needing more leaders on defense. He said something like "We are looking for wolves, not sheep. We want every player on defense to be a leader, not somebody who's looking for a sheepdog to guide them around and lead them." That, to me, gets to the heart of the matter: We should all be leaders in our way.
I struggle to name three great present-time politicians.
That's OK, I struggle to name a single "great politician", ever. In fact, I consider the term to be an oxymoron.
"We don't need "Great leaders", in the sense of how most people use that term (that is, political leaders). We just need people to be free to do what they do best - live, love, learn, play, grow, work, build, create and dream without arbitrary restrictions and constraints imposed through force"
That's extremelly cool but that does nothing for a country which have just experienced a revolution and now doesn't know what to do with itself.
There are people who proved capable of creating a country following a revolution. My latest impression is Ataturk, but you can find one or two in the history of USA.
>"We are looking for wolves, not sheep. We want every player on defense to be a leader, not somebody who's looking for a sheepdog to guide them around and lead them."
All the more ironic when one actually understands the social structure of wolf packs.
I have high hopes for Elizabeth Warren. I also hope Lawrence Lessig runs for national office someday.
But the general trend you refer to is accurate. The various vested interests have got character assassination down to a science, and anyone who doesn't play ball at least a little tends to be filtered out of the political process.
I agree that there are no great world leaders at the moment but that doesn't mean we "no longer" have them. Clinton was the most recent great leader in the West, in my opinion. We could easily have another in the next decade. Blair was nearly there, as is Merkel, though she feels like more of an administrator than a leader.
Merkel is quite the opposite of great. While she would make a decent politician in a regional level, as the recent history shows she lacks the abilities to deal on global (or even European stage)
Clinton had the benefit of cashing on the post cold war sole super power golden decade and the upper slope of the dot com bubble. His mishandling of the Kosovo events set a ticking time bomb there.
What did Clinton do that would qualify him for great? Honestly, from where I'm sitting, what did Clinton do that set him apart from any other President at all?
And Tony Blair? A head of state that was just seen as a puppet of another as 'almost great'?
I won't argue that Clinton was great like JFK, or even Reagan, but when fishing for great Western leaders of the past thirty years is there anyone else who comes out better?
Blair on the other hand led the reformation of the Labour party and made them electable again, whilst mainaining Britain's standing on the world stage, far from a puppet actually.
>I won't argue that Clinton was great like JFK, or even Reagan, but when fishing for great Western leaders of the past thirty years is there anyone else who comes out better?
Better by comparison is not the same as great. It is quite possible that there be no great leaders. I do not know of anything Clinton did that would be great.
>Blair on the other hand led the reformation of the Labour party and made them electable again, whilst mainaining Britain's standing on the world stage, far from a puppet actually.
Making a party electable again may be a sign of a savvy leader, but it is not greatness. Britian's standing on the world stage under Blair was one of a lapdog in many circles. Again, a leader that garners the reputation as a puppet is not a great leader.
Especially in the case of Blair and Clinton, they were in power during relatively benign economic times. I can't help but feel that it's easy to like people who never had any really serious problems to deal with. Certainly not on the scale of those imposed by the financial crisis/euro crisis.
But I will grant you, they both had something about them, a force of personality perhaps that exceeds many other politicians.
What's so great about Clinton? Except giving endless material for comic shows and explicit jokes, I have hard time recalling something that would nominate him personally for greatness.
I fail to see either of them as great. They're the difference between a (wo)man in office saying right words and one saying wrong words. They certainly got most of their words right but anyone could say those. From great leader I expect doing something nobody else in their position could.
I could make a case that a good leader is mostly hot air. What distinguishes a great leader is performing the right words and gestures for their zeitgeist, thereby becoming a symbolic figurehead that shapes broad social forces into real progress.
Perhaps, then, our lack of good leaders is not about the leaders themselves, but rather due to the fragmentation of cultures and social institutions.
That, or bottom-up big-tent coalitions that can stitch together a bunch of fragmented groups. (For all their many faults, the Republicans had this formula perfected in the 80's and early 00's.)
You have to adapt this formula to a post-revolution country where nobody trusts nobody, nobody knows what they want, people have bizzare ideas that have nothing in common with reality (think religions), and there is no political rallying point to stitch groups around.
If we don't have them this would be excellent. Great politicians make people abandon reason and throw themselves into crazy fantasies which cost millions of lives. One charismatic German being at the right place at the right time cost the world more than a decade of unimaginable suffering and hundred millions dead. And that's in Europe, considered most advanced and civilized part of the world. And that's not the only example.
Thank you very much, I'd rather deal with a hundred of regular politicians and their regular small-time stupidity and their regular small-time mistakes and evils than with one monumental charismatic figure like that.
"I'd rather deal with a hundred of regular politicians and their regular small-time stupidity"
That doesn't work in a revolutionary country. What you get is a hundred of gangs.
Why do we need great political leaders? Where are they leading us and why should we follow those who have an appetite for so much power? People should think for themselves and follow their own convictions and espouse true virtue, not get carried away with the mythology and worship of politicians. Great political leaders are like super heroes in movies and comics: they're a cheap, vicarious substitute for being a leader (or hero) in your own life.
Why do we need political leaders at all? Why do we need a mediocre (wo)man on top instead of some kind of direct democracy?
If you've got leaders at least be sure you have good ones.
WRT power: you're so wrong. Great political leader is capable of creating a country. Or rethinking one. They produce power out of the thin air, for everybody to use. Mediocre leaders? They tend to "consume" power. Exactly what you are fearing.
The reason we dont have good leaders or good music or good anything is because there is too much information and misinformation out there no adays alot of what makes something great is often the "secret sauce" and nothing secret anymore. But I believe that of the politicans music bands athletes etc will be called great 30 years from now too much cyncism in our society right now
I'm curious if anyone agrees with Assange's point about the silly emphasis on Terrorism, Iran, and carefully chosen groups of 3rd world people who can be rescued, but disagrees with his larger points about the book and Google.
My guess would be that most of those criticizing Assange in this thread support US policy on terrorism, Israel, Wikileaks, illegal spying, drones, etc. Most Americans (in both major parties) support government policies on these issues, and so HN readership is unlikely to differ much.
Most Americans are indifferent and/or oblivious to most government foreign policy. Yes, 9/11 was a big deal in this country, and so most Americans support a "war" on terrorism.
But the rest of it is totally off the typical American's radar. I'd venture that a majority of Americans couldn't find Israel on an unlabelled world map. Nor could they articulate US policy for/against Israel.
Same with Wikileaks, illegal spying, drones, etc. A majority of Americans don't know anything about those, nor do they support (or oppose) government policies on those issues.
I think that HN readership is atypical of "most Americans". IMO.
A company whose incentives are aligned with its consumers truly has the power to not "be evil". Google was not that company. It doesn't mean that company is impossible.
The way to align interests with the consumers is to be consumer-owned, i.e. a cooperative. Reality is that all businesses have a huge range of complex interests.
Just like national security is kept out of purview of all "Right to Information" acts, what will it take to make some personal information either legally, or technically, untrackable by the government?
What will it take civil contractors to install backdoors inside government IT systems to regularly let the voting public know what their government is really discussing/emailing.
Julian Assange is an idiot. He blames the victim. Google is a problem for privacy!? The US government is! Nobody forces you to use Google, and Google isn't the organization secretly gathering information with secret warrants. That's the US government, who is forcing Google (and any company in their way) to do their bidding.
Why not focus attention on the actual bad guys: The NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the White House, and the entire fucking national security committee.
"Nobody forces you to use Google" is an example of a very problematic common bit of rhetoric. You can also say nobody forces you to use the internet or have a car or whatever else. Google is not a true monopoly, but they are monopolistic. They exist in a world of oligopolies. There is not as much choice as there should be, and this is a threat to privacy and to freedom.
Having non-democratic oligopolies is already a threat, period.
Forced to use Google? No, but Google is certainly interested in convincing you to use them. So many people are convinced and aren't aware of any issues.
In the end, "forced to use" is bad rhetoric because it is a straw man. Nobody was arguing to the contrary. Tearing down that straw man fails to address the actual problems.
Because Google's (and other) gadgets are the sugar coating for surveillance. Nobody would voluntarily wear a government-mandated gps-tracker with a remote-controllable microphone, but most people (including myself) are readily buying them from Google which enables governments to access a lot of interesting data with far less outrage as if they would access is directly.
I am not following closely, but Mr. Assange does seem to have some public criticism of the organizations you mentioned.
Right. So instead of directing our ire at the government which is using the gps-tracker with remote-controllable microphone to spy on you, we should be angry at Google because the government happens to use them to accomplish this end? If Google closed up shop tomorrow, the government would not stop doing this!
I'm sorry but in no way does Google deserve scrutiny over the FBI/CIA/DoJ.
A few years back there was a pizza and Mediterranean restaurant run by a bunch of Egyptian immigrants in my town.
They continuously ran middle eastern TV on a few sets, and I'd be watching music video programs that gave phone numbers that people in Iraq, Kuwait, and other Arabic zone countries could send text messages to to vote for music videos.
My wife and I concluded that anybody who's been suckered into voting for their favorite music videos wasn't going to be a Jihadist, in fact, such a person would be harmless to anyone.
I hate you I hate you I hate you, you fucking rapist piece of shit. But this article is fucking amazing. But you are a rapist scumbag. Fuck you Julian Assange, you could have been so fucking brilliant but you are a fucking rapist and FUCK YOU
Most people won't even let themselves imagine what could be done with Google if evil was an option. How many hours would it take to compile a list of everyone who searches for incest porn and correlate that with 'people who are judges'. Considering that the incest fetish runs as high as 10% such information could be used to perform a bloodless coup. Call the legal system nullified, and lobbyists obsolete.
And that is just one facet of the simplest way Google could be used for evil (blackmail). There are infinite ways Google's information asymmetry could be exploited, and most of them would be completely invisible and 100% effective.
Thats why I'm glad we have Sergey and Larry running under the banner of "Don't be Evil." It shows that even from the beginning they realized they were going to wield terrible power, and they were a bit honest with that fact.