Google has posted the brief they submitted to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus justifying their participation in Chinese censorship of information. The argument basically boils down to “providing Chinese access to filtered information is better than no information.”
Another nugget from the brief: “In deciding how best to approach the Chinese – or any – market, we must balance our commitments to satisfy the interests of users, expand access to information, and respond to local conditions.”
What happened with “Don’t be evil” as a commitment? In fact, it seems Google now uses some kind of “evil-scale” to determine how evil certain actions might be and how much evilness they’re willing to accept.
It seems the “don’t be evil” mantra wasn’t a hard and fast ethical rule for how Google will make decisions afterall.
MichaelZimmer.org 