[mpd]

> No reasonable person could understand the phrase, "Don't Be Evil," to mean, "Don't do things that I personally consider evil."

TBH, I think almost everyone treats the former statement, as meaning the latter. Did you mistype here?

Maybe there's even something different about using "evil" here, specifically. Would another word have a different outcome?

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

> TBH, I think almost everyone treats the former statement, as meaning the latter. Did you mistype here?

I don't think so. For example, there are religions that consider the lending of money to be evil, but I am quite certain Google did not have in mind that adherents of these religions should leak documents to the press if Google were to offer a credit card. Likewise, Google was not interested in the moral views of its conservative religious employees when it started offering various types of support for LGBTQ people.

I think when most people hear, "Don't be evil," they understand it to mean things along the lines of, "Don't be unfair to users, don't act with malice, don't lie, cheat, or steal, etc." I.e. don't do things that are essentially universally considered evil. I do not believe many people interpret that as, "protest every time Google violates your personal moral code, no matter how esoteric or idiosyncratic."

[danielheath]

Those things are clearly ~not~ universally seen as evil in the corporate world (and other places, but the corporate world is the relevant area here), given the prevalence of deception & unfair conduct present.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

> Those things are clearly ~not~ universally seen as evil in the corporate world

I mean, we're getting pretty deep into the weeds of what we mean by, "seen as evil" or even "evil" at this point. Which is kinda what I was getting at. I think stealing is universally understood to be evil, even in the corporate world, but people will differ on what stealing actually is, or whether a particular act is stealing. A recent example that comes to mind is the Citibank/Revlon situation. I personally thought that was theft by Revlon, but there are a lot of people who see it another way. I understand that Revlon's employees did not view their behavior as evil, even if it seemed bad to me.

Nearly everyone is righteous in their own eyes. And adults understand this. That's part of why it's my view that most people will understand Google's former motto to not be inclusive of being an activist against Google's interests, even in morally ambiguous cases, and even after being asked not to. I don't really have any way to convey this more clearly, so I guess we'll have to let time, that great prover of claims, tell. Maybe I'm wrong and the court will hand these people a willion dollars. I don't think so.

[bananabreakfast]

No one treats it that way.

A reasonable person should understand it not as requesting to make subjective personal judgments but rather as what it clearly was meant as: "Don't be Microsoft"

[Tempest1981]

Really? Microsoft never crossed my mind when hearing the motto years ago.

I interpreted it more generically as "make the world a better place... by organizing the world's information, and making it easily accessible".

[native_samples]

Lack of history. I worked there and this is correct. The motto originates in the very earliest days of Google when they - like most other software firms - feared Microsoft more than any other company. In particular they feared being locked out of Windows or discouraged via IE defaults, killed the same way Netscape was. This was a big part of the reason for the original Google Toolbar. It was at the height of the Microsoft trial, Gates had been doing a lot of questionable things and there was a general agreement that the company was Bad News. Slashdot's Borg logo dates from this time.

Don't be Evil was basically a kind of jokey collective agreement that Google wouldn't become like Microsoft. Of course twenty years later the industry had grown enormously, Microsoft is no longer the big bad wolf, many working people in tech have no recollection of any of this and in America, exist in an ideological pressure cooker that tells them anything that isn't left wing is "evil". So the motto had been lifted out of its very 90s and software specific context to become a stick for perpetual interns to beat people of the wrong political persuasion.

If this stupidity actually goes anywhere near a serious court case it wouldn't surprise me if this history gets dug up.

[mpd]

Only if said "reasonable person" were around in the 90's, and knew the shit that MS was trying to pull. I happen to be one of those people, but that's not the catch of the day here.

[q1w2]

The issue is that they used their own interpretation of "don't be evil", even when the company TOLD them that certain things were not evil.

The phrase is meant to be a catch-all against policies that are not specified - not a carte-blanche to do whatever the F you want in contradiction of what the company is telling you.

[AlbertCory]

> "I think almost everyone treats the former statement, as meaning the latter"

First of all, that's debatable. Even if true, they're wrong.

[mpd]

If your only special move is "You're wrong!", it's going to be hard to talk to you. What do you think is debatable?