I applaud Google's Don't Be Evil ethic. Maybe it really is possible for a modern corporation to do well by doing good. But if Google is going to advertise itself as a kind of holier-than-thou corporation that should be trusted with our information, then they should be prepared to be held to that higher standard.

Today Google committed an evil act. (That's evil with a lowercase e, because there's no sense in confusing this evil with the Evil of Thursday's terror in London or today's 10-year anniversary of the Srebrenica atrocity.)

Google's evil seems insignificant. All they did was change a goofy posting on the Google Blog, probably to shelter an innocent Googler from a very public joke.

But the fact is that the old posting is gone and the replacement posting uses a digitally altered version of the original photograph. There's no notice that Google has rewritten history just a little bit. They even kept the original date and time stamp.

For any other company, this would simply be a violation of blog etiquette. But for Google, which wants us to trust it with the world's information, this move qualifies as evil.

The protagonist of Orwell's 1984 is a low-level worker in a totalitarian regime who rewrites the news to fit the regime's definition of reality. The old version is flushed down the "memory hole."

Google is willing to censor news results in China (just a little bit, mind you, not nearly as bad as Microsoft). And now they're willing to flush old blog entries down the memory hole (just minor human-interest posts, mind you, nothing really important).

But these little white lies are bothersome from a company with Google's power and reach into every aspect of public and private information. Google has told us to expect better of them.

Here's the original posting which I copied from my browser's cache:

[original post]

Cube surfeit disorder
7/08/2005 05:13:00 PM
Posted by Michael Krantz, Google Blog Team

Can this Googler possibly be working at peak productivity?

And here's the current version with completely different text and the photo edited to blank out the name "Kathy Baxter" in the gray oval in the upper right corner. There is no indication of a change and the post retains the same timestamp as the original. [Update 7/12 12:50 AM - Could the blanked-out "Kathy Baxter" possibly be this Kathy Baxter, the usability engineer from Oracle and later eBay?]


[new post]

Tchotchkes cubed
7/08/2005 05:13:00 PM
Posted by Michael Krantz, Google Blog Team

Every time I pass this cube I wonder why my own work space looks so lame.

For more on the ethics of digital photo retouching see J.D. Lasica's excellent article from 1988. Please comment if you think I'm overreacting here.