New Mantra: Do a little evil

What really pisses me off about the decision by Google to filter search results and blogs in exchange for access to the market in China is that it comes a mere week after their much publicized effort to fight a DOJ subpeona for search keywords and URL's (and no, not any private data from users). What is Google saying, that's it's okay to use their technology to censor political speech and limit individual freedoms, but it's not okay to use their technology to limit access to pornography by minors and child pornography? Apparently.

Google created a lot of buzz when they put the phrase "don't be evil" in the prospectus for their public filing, indeed they were hailed as a new and visionary kind of company. In the end "don't be evil" is pure bullshit, steamy stinking crap that you have to scrape off the bottom of your shoe. Someone should remind Larry/Sergey that it's not enough to put out cute slogans, you have to actually live up to your meticulously crafted brand values with your actions and this China business flies in the face of everything they stand for, supposedly... never mind, it was always about the money to begin with.

Take a moment to consider the pure hypocrisy of this statement by Larry Page in response to the DOJ subpeona just last week:

"Our company relies on having the trust of our users and using that
information for that benefit," said Page. "That's a very strong
motivation for us. We're committed to that. If you start to mandate how
products are designed, I think that's a really bad path to follow. I
think instead we should have laws that protect the privacy of data, for
example, from government requests and other kinds of requests."

I am building a new blog to replace this one, was going to use Google AdSense instead of Kanoodle for ads. In considering the issues above I decided I'll never run a Google service or product on my blog, and I changed my default start page in Firefox to a non-Google search page. I am not alone.

Technorati Tags: Google, China, don't-be-evil, DOJ

Comments

[Peter Cranstone]

Well said.

[DT Strain]

Nope, you're not alone friend. (and thanks for the link)
:)

DT Strain