Don’t be evil?

By: | Post date: January 19, 2010 | Comments: 266 Comments

Posted in categories: Opinions

This is the motto of Google, which is involved in a rumor that it would leave Chinese market due to the conflicts of its motto and the regulation from the Chinese government, for example, to disclose the emails of gmail users who are suspected illegal by Chinese law enforcement system.

Does this stand?

As a controversial example, if FBI/CIA suspect that somebody is using Gmail to establish communication with terrorists, or to smuggle US military secret to a foreign agent, can FBI/CIA obtain the emails of those suspected criminals from Google? Would Google has done evil if it cooperated with the government agencies but afterward the suspect is cleared? Or would Google has done evil if it refused to disclose the user information but afterward an attack was proven to be managed by the information transmitted by this account?

More inward, a lot of illegal information could be transferred through email, not limited to plots of overthrowing a government, but for drug smuggling, sexual contents, until computer virus spreading, malware, to minimal like personal oral abusing and other junk mails. If Google declares that it will never filter information transferred through Gmail, it is helping evil to be delivered to the victims. If Google does filtering, it jeopardize the privacy of all its users.

It is the same for search engine. Are Pagerank and Adsense the only way of “don’t be evil”? If so, porn contents, malware, and other harmful web contents would surely get a “fair” exposure to public, and by doing this, Google helps the mal-content developer to earn their business by damaging others’ life and future. Can anybody admit that giving the fair chance to evil doers matches the spirit of “don’t do evil”? If you said yes, then you will have to admit that all law enforcement agencies are “doing evil”, because all what they did, are doing, and will do are to limit the chance of evil spreading as much as possible. Then do we need law enforcement? Of course yes. and of course it is not evil, at least mostly not.

So the conclusion is clear, that absolutely not filtered Pagerank and Adsense, absolutely not monitored email, are actually doing evil by offering evil contents fair chance of transmitting. Or in a bigger plot, fairness is not another expression of “don’t be evil”.

Then you have to apply filtering and monitoring above email, Pagerank and Adsense to reduce its risk of being evil. And the filtering and monitoring are subjective. Certainly not all subjective things are evil. However, one has to admit, that subjective things have higher risk of being evil than objective things. The threshold is fine and conceived. It can be crossed in any next moment. And the boundary is unclear. Nobody has ever be able to draw the line single handed. And this is why we have laws. By laws, the line is drawn to the current common definition of evil of not. The law has never been globally agreed, and may never be due to the difference of the culture, custom, and society. Lots of things are legal in one neighborhood and illegal in another. We are familiar and used of this situation.

Do not go there if you disagree with the laws there. This is actually the most practical behavior of “don’t do evil”. And this fit for Google’s China debate.

http://insidegoogle.com/

266 Comments