Lauren Weinstein on Google

I've been a long-time subscriber to Dave Farber's IP list (for Interesting People). I frequently see comments from Lauren Weinstein's blog. He writes very well, and is a frequent critic of high tech companies on privacy issues.

This week there was a great post, Lauren Weinstein's Blog: For Google and Others, Few Good Deeds Go Unpunished, where Lauren gave a very interesting and even somewhat sympathetic analysis of Google. The most interesting part for me was:
I simply don't sense in Google today the sort of utterly predatory attitude toward its users that does seem to pervade some other major Internet-related firms. This is not to say that I agree with all Google policies -- as regular readers of this blog know. But I believe it's safe to say that even many (or most) Google employees also don't necessarily agree with all of Google's policies. It seems clear from public statements that even the Google leadership feels internally conflicted at times regarding some of their own policy issues -- torn between fiduciary considerations and the real world complexities of operations in a politically-charged international arena.

It's great that Google takes "Don't Be Evil" seriously, for lots of reasons. One of them surrounds employee expectations that they will: recruiting employees is one of Google's top challenges. I'm hoping that more and more companies will be influenced towards better societal behavior: by employee pressure, by recruiting pressure and maybe (heavens) by investor pressure. All good business reasons to not be bad!

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