"Don't be evil" is the informal corporate motto of Google. Many people think this is a joke, especially after the
Google Street View Data Collection scandal. What Google had done, although unethical, wasn't that bad in the scale of things. If anything it just served to help raised awareness of what had already been happening for years. During my BSc (Hons) degree at Plymouth University nearly 10 years ago, we covered war driving and people even undertook it as part of their project. People were driving around connecting to unsecured (and secured) wireless networks long before Google did it.
Going back to the slogan, when applied to online information retrieval Google have done extremely well to uphold their initial values.
- No pay for inclusion (in index)
- No pay for placement (in ranking)
- Clearly demarked results and ads
- 20% engineer time doing random stuff
- Users come first
So give Google a break, after all they probably already have all your personal details (thanks Facebook) and they're not going to disappear anytime soon!
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