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Is Google Evil?

Is Google evil?

In 2001, just a few years after Sergey Brin and Larry Page formed Google out of a garage, company brass adopted the phrase “Don’t Be Evil” as a corporate motto and philosophy. And why not? Their search product revolutionized the Internet and their ad platform broke up the agency stranglehold to help empower the little guy.

Things got murky, though. Google began raising ethical concerns with various projects including mapping the entire planet, archiving classic works of literature and storing newspaper articles. With a project aimed at photographing every street in America and beyond, a feature that tracks the physical location of its users, an e-mail service that searches for keywords in written correspondence – and now with a new online service that records and transcribes voicemail – Google has raised eyebrows among privacy advocates.

Google has built a multi-billion dollar empire, with thousands of employees and a stock price envied around the world – but with great power comes great responsibility, and some fear the Mountain View, Calif.-based company could slowly be turning into a 21st century Big Brother.

Could Google, in fact, be evil?

Let’s take a closer look:

FACT: Google is best known for its search function, used by millions each day to locate sites on the Web. As the dominant search engine, Google wields considerable power in driving traffic to other sites including nydailynews.com.

In fact, Google’s so dominant it has become the window to the Web for a majority of Internet users. According to Nielsen Online’s numbers for February, more than 63% of all Web searches in the U.S. were initiated using Google – and that number is growing.

Who knows what could happen when one company directs such a large chunk of traffic on the Web?

In January, for example, a single human error caused Google to red flag every single site on the Internet as malware. Though the mistake was quickly caught, for a time Google advised users to avoid each and every URL on the Web, warning that the sites may damage computers. It’s not at all a stretch to wonder what else could happen, either because of human error or through something more nefarious.

Google also tracks and stores data about users, including their search terms and IP addresses, which has long been a privacy battleground. It also keeps an extensive cache of Web sites, meaning something you delete from your site today could still be on the Web tomorrow, whether you’d like it to be or not.

FACT: Google Earth and Google Maps have become the gold standard on the Web for planning trips and plotting destinations, while Google Street View, available in cities and towns throughout the world, even provides 360-degree street-level images. The revolutionary breadth and scope of this information gives Google an extraordinarily powerful tool.

Google has created a cottage industry for bloggers, who’ve gathered screen captures from Street View showing citizens in compromising positions, from a teenager crashing his bicycle to what appears to be a man breaking into someone’s home. Few are aware they’re being photographed by a camera attached to the top of a Google vehicle passing by on the street.

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