Thursday, January 11, 2007

What Google Might Do to Be Really Evil/ Good

If Google was downright, no-holds-barred evil, they might:

• Read your email to get new product ideas
• Show you less views in AdSense then you actually get
• Send your search queries around the office to have a laugh
• Censor search results
• Accept bribes to push results up the rankings
• More frequently index sites with AdSense
• Improve the rankings of sites using AdSense
• Bundle their desktop software with stuff you didn’t ask for
• Add self-promotion to search results
• Give certain governments direct connections to their data through APIs and such
• Stop disclosing that an AdSense ad is an ad
• Downrank Google-critical pages in Google results
• Look the other way if pages of friends or colleagues spam Google results
• Actively suppress human rights groups
• Share their data on you freely with third parties
• Take down Google-critical Blogger blogs
• Not accept or take down Google-critical Google News sources
• Think short-term
• Compromise their moral principles
• Allow governments to influence what Google News sources are acceptable
• Blacklist certain reporters or magazines because they didn’t like their story
• Work towards creating a monopoly
• Do things with your data which their privacy policy didn’t mention
• Keep your data when they told you they deleted it
• Not keep core promises
• Fire employees for reasons of race, gender, or age
• Buy up web application competition to then stop their products
• Tune their results so competition doesn’t rank well
• Change a terms of service page without telling anyone
• Freely share your data with the government
• Lie to the public

If Google was completely, whitehat shining good, they might:

• Promote competition in search results
• Be very transparent about everything
• Share their code through lots of open source projects
• Freely host open source projects
• Release a lot of free, high-quality tools that improve productivity
• Think long-term
• Respect copyright of content owners
• Never say a bad word about competitors
• Send out gifts to advertisers
• Donate free AdSense to non-profit organizations
• Be honest to why they’re shutting down services
• Allow people to move their emails when they’re switching email clients
• Create tools and services to circumvent censorship

• Invite people to visit the Googleplex
• Allow people to move their blog posts when they’re switching their blogging service
• Be conscious about their gatekeeping role and always maintain the best possible neutrality
• Make their services work well on a variety of devices for blind or sight-impaired people
• Take bug reports seriously and fix bugs quickly
• Conform to web standards as best as they can
• Push civil liberties wherever they have a local search presence
• Focus on the user rather than making money, if the two goals ever collide
• Openly admit to and revert errors made
• Stand by their moral principles without compromise
• Protect your data from potential government intrusions
• Warn searchers if they click on potential malware results
• Provide a search engine for outsider voices which are often suppressed
• Get rid of all sneaky ads in Google AdSense
• Give free food to employees
• Donate 20% of their employees brainpower to improve the state of the world, e.g. issues like global warming
• Release all of the content they create (like blog posts) under a Creative Commons license
• Give every country a chance to access the same search results, if requested
• Actively try to avoid user lock-in
• Strongly believe in web democracy
• Actively support human rights groups
• Donate a lot to important charity organizations
• Create a large charity organization of their own
• Donate cycles of their server farm for third-party programs, especially those of non-profit organizations

I leave it to you to decide what Google already does, from either list.

What Google Might Do to B ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (16)

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