Do. No. Evil.
Do No Evil. One of the things that people tend to throw back at Google when they refer to them as the burgeoning evil is the idea that this is some kind of marketing slogan that we feed the world.
Those words aren’t for you. They’re for us.
I read Greg’s post1 a week ago, and meant to talk about it then. The Privacy International nonsense survey has already been expertly taken apart by Danny Sullivan (not a Google fanboy), then Matt Cutts covered the areas that Privacy International ignored, so there isn’t really a great deal I can add about that specifically — except perhaps to say that of all the organisations I’ve worked at, including the banks and pension companies, Google is by far the most serious about protecting their customer’s privacy.
But ignore that débâcle for the minute, and just read the rest of Greg’s post. Catchy marketing phrase it may be, but it’s more than that as well: the existence of a culture that produces things like “Do No Evil”, promotes the use of clean energy (see also, Solar Panel Project), and set up a programme that donates millions of dollars each year to Open Source projects is one of the main reasons that I’m working at Google now — and also the same reason that I never considered applying to Microsoft. And like Greg, if I thought we were doing evil, well, I wouldn’t be here.
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Sadly taken down with the rest of his blog in 2010. ↩