Google starting to turn evil?
Posted on March 16, 2004 @ 08:17 in General
Alex Halavais has had a nasty run in with Google when he applied for the Google Adwords service and was "disproved" for, amongst other, I believe unfounded, gripes, supposedly criticising Bush. This is what the Google employee who reviewed his application stated:
Additionally, you go on in your commentary to use language that advocates against President Bush. All of this sort of material would need to be removed before we would approve the ad to run on Google.
Google's founders claim "not to do evil" but maybe their company is getting too big for their mentality to filter through to all their employees. I certainly hope that this statement is not a reflection of the management's point of view, because that would mean we can't trust Google anymore. Not that it is ever safe to put too much trust in one company or organization... which is, I guess, why democracy is the lesser of evils to 'choose' from.
Update: well, for the moment Alex's Adwords ad is running on Google, pending further approval of "Adwords Policy Specialists." Remains the reminder of Google's power over what we can find on the internet, which is not necessarily a bad thing, because they seem to be doing a good job at letting us find what we want to find. Because it works so well most of the time it's easy to forget that finding stuff with a search engine is as much the work of politics and policy as it is of technology.
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