As you all know, the informal motto of Google has always been “Don’t be Evil”, which of course sounds very pleasant. But with time, they’ve certainly become increasingly profit-driven and corporate, and sometimes downright annoying (see any of the Google AdWords rants of this blog). Not exactly evil, but not the barefoot, organic, peace-loving hippies they were originally portrayed as.
And what about Larry Page and Sergey Brin? With Google, the issue that keeps coming up is that of privacy, and how much you can find out about a person simply by googling them. Mr Page and Mr Brin, however, appear to be total hermits – it’s impossible to find out anything about their personal lives. They’ve bought their homes under other people’s names and chosen unlisted phone numbers, and they never post anything remotely personal anywhere on the web. Hmmm.
If you’re interested in reading more on this topic, head on over to this article at MotherJones. The following quote is likely to whet your appetite.
“[T]he question is not whether Google will always do the right thing—it hasn’t, and it won’t. It’s whether Google, with its insatiable thirst for your personal data, has become the greatest threat to privacy ever known, a vast informational honey pot that attracts hackers, crackers, online thieves, and—perhaps most worrisome of all—a government intent on finding convenient ways to spy on its own citizenry.”
