ONCE upon a time, back in the almost unimaginable days before Google was a household name and a search engine clicked by almost every computer user on the planet, three geeks were sitting in the company’s modest office in California preparing to meet some possible new recruits.
The geeks fell to talking about how they would like the company to be represented to the outside world. One of them, an engineer named Amit Patel, suddenly got up from his chair, walked to the whiteboard and wrote in minuscule script, “Don’t be evil”.
According to one of those present, the geeks thought it a rather jolly joke. But soon those three innocuous words were to be seen scrawled on whiteboards all over the office building. And when the company floated two years ago, they were one of the more unusual features of its prospectus.
“Don’t be evil.” Such a charming concept — and extremely presumptuous. While provoking cynical sniggers among financial analysts, it sat well with the company’s innocent, flower-power idealism and with the staggering ambition it set itself, “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
It was also a handy marketing tool to differentiate their upstart search engine from Microsoft, embroiled in endless battles with anti-trust authorities in America and Europe. Google, it said, was not an ugly, monopolistic profit machine crushing all in its path, but a company devoted to the good of mankind.
Could Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page now be regretting it? Could “Don’t be evil” and the dangerously high expectations it has raised, become a threat to the company’s share price? It is tempting to think so. Google shares, although still at inter-planetary levels, have been on a roller-coaster in the past 10 days amid revised earnings expectations and rows over privacy and censorship.
Critics in the blogosphere lambast it for hypocrisy in collaborating with China’s totalitarian rulers in censoring its new Chinese service. In reality, they say, Google’s motto is: “Don’t be evil, except where you have to in the cause of ever-larger profits”.
Unease over its Chinese strategy is only one of the controversies and legal disputes now swarming round the company. Brand owners, upset by the opportunity Google offers consumers to compare prices, accuse it of evilly infringing their trademarks. Book publishers aghast at Google’s plan to digitise copyrighted books and make snippets of them freely available accuse it of theft.
In a way the backlash is not surprising: you don’t become the fastest-growing company in history without making enemies. Yet I can’t help feeling that Google’s critics are mostly barking up the wrong trees.
In China, for example, other internet companies have made far worse compromises with the regime than Google. Yahoo infamously landed a Chinese journalist in a local gulag by handing over details of his e-mail account.
Google, after agonising about what to do in China for a year, decided not to run an e-mail service there for related reasons. It has persuaded the authorities to allow it to specify when a search result is withheld, thus spurring savvy Chinese searchers to look elsewhere for information about Tibet, the Tiananmen Square massacre or the banned Falun Gong sect. On these terms, is it really “evil” for a search engine to develop a presence on the ground, with all the potential it has to help open China to the outside world? The truth is, I don’t believe the furore has done any harm to the trust among hundreds of millions of consumers — and among advertisers — on which Google’s business is based.
In its legal battles over trademarks, in which it has mostly prevailed, it remains the consumer’s friend, and the promoter of price competition.
In its dispute with the publishers over scanning copyrighted books, Google may have behaved clumsily, but only the paranoid believe it is on a mission to destroy the very notion of copyright.
Suppose that, far from stealing publishers’ business, it was genuinely trying to create a new channel for them to promote and sell books — including works long out of print? No, the real threat to Google’s image and stupendous market value does not lie in controversies about China or starving authors. It comes from growing worries about individual privacy in the digital age, highlighted by a battle the company is fighting with the US Justice Department over access to its data. In this area, Google has its work cut out to fulfil its motto.
The issue arises because of the sheer volume of data about its users accumulated on Google’s vast network of servers. Like many other internet companies, it puts “cookies” on users’ computers that make it possible to track searches in a personally identifiable way. These cookies, amazingly, do not expire until 2038.
Enter Big Brother, in the form of the American government. Under the Patriot Act, the counter-terrorism law passed after September 11, Washington can gain access to information on Google’s computers simply by presenting a subpoena. And Google and other search engines may not even be able to tell users when they hand over searches or e-mail messages.
In the current (non-terrorism-related) case, Google is refusing to hand over data on patterns of internet use the administration says it needs to uphold child-protection laws. That is all well and good — and arguably compliant with “Don’t be evil”. But the mere fact of the dispute worries the stock market: when the news broke, Google shares fell nearly 9%.
One might ask how Google accumulated all that data on its users without their knowledge or explicit permission. Google will say it has an explicit privacy policy for any user to read on its website. But people don’t read privacy policies. I certainly didn’t know until I researched this piece that Google has cookies on me and will continue to hold them for 32 years.
Does it really need all that stuff to help it improve its technology? I hardly think so. It is more likely to be hoarding your personal data as a treasure trove for its marketeers.
But if that information has a chance of landing in the hands of the CIA, or of our own snoops, then we should be alarmed.
And if Google, despite its current court stand, comes to be seen as Big Brother’s little helper, then “Don’t be evil” will be past its sell-by date. It will have forfeited the public’s trust.
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