A Cautionary Tale on Google

As most all non-cave dwellers have heard, Google's philosophy is "do no evil" (okay, that's not completely true and it does vary at times, granted. As of 2/15/10, the phrase is:
"You can make money without doing evil.")

The tricky part about Evil is this: Not everyone doing evil things knows it. Sure, the hardcore, fully self-realized villain, complete with world destruction plans and twirling mustache eccentricities is fairly easy to recognize but, as Spinoza pointed out, defining Evil is a very subjective thing, "So everyone, by the highest right of Nature, judges what is good and what is evil, considers his own advantage according to his own temperament." When Thomas Aquinas took a run at it, he got into trouble almost immediately:

It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the name God means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist.

He later managed to move the issue down a few theological levels and say that the whole problem falls into humanity's lap:

But since the rational soul is likewise joined to a matter composed of contraries, from the inclination of that matter there results corruptibility in the whole man. In this respect, man is naturally corruptible as regards the nature of his matter, if it is left to its own inclination, but not as regards its form.

So, okay, what evil lurks in the hearts of Men? The Shadow knows, got it.

Now, we believe the fine folks at Google are quite rational souls and that, true to their charter, their intent is neither to corrupt or advance evil in any way. The problem is, however, they make fantastic tools which, to whose more corruptible souls in the world, can very much be used for evil. The Googlers' intent is good, but their tools arm both Good and Evil alike.

So, the cautionary tale of Google is thus: While their hearts be pure, they may have a little too much innocence for this world. Recently, Google announced "Google Buzz" during which, with all manner of dewey-eyed, social networking, world-uniting community organization-building intended, they utterly failed to default the settings to the basic notions of privacy and wariness that many early adopters wanted -- and expected. Honestly, we believe they had no evil intent, they just didn't think about it much. Perhaps from their view, togetherness is the norm, openness is the goal and privacy is, it seems, an after thought for others.

Google is rich in talent and potential but if they truly lack this fundamental understanding of how the world truly is, regardless the lofty goals of a Utopian tomorrow, do we really, really want to give them our data so readily? If I chose to store my data in a cloud programmed be people who fundamentally view privacy so lightly, is it really their fault when all of my identity is shared hither and yon?

"Do I trust Google with my data?" is not the question so much as "Do I trust Google's coders to understand that there is Evil in the world and to code accordingly?" Not so much. For a company that has foreign governments attacking its security in search of data to turn around and have default-open privacy settings on a newly coded software system is too blatant a contradiction for us to ignore.

A wise Unix hacker once told me: The safest way to avoid being hacked is never put the data together in the first place. Google will build the tools, but it is up to us to decide whether we use them, populate them, give them the bullets.

From the Department of Paranoid, let it first be heard here: 'Ware the Nascent Cloud