“Don’t be evil.” It’s been Google’s informal corporate motto for years; and for the most part, people have been willing to take it at its word.
In January, things changed. Google announced that the new Chinese version of its site, Google.cn, would comply with Beijing policy by removing politically sensitive websites from search results. Just like that, the company that is thought of by so many as the very embodiment of the information-wants-to-be-free ethic found itself widely accused of abetting the suppression of political dissent. Defending its actions in an official statement, Google pointed to the fact that its existing sites are already subject to silent filtering by the Chinese government, resulting in sluggish response times and service blackouts. Complying with Beijing’s demands, the company argued optimistically, would not only improve user access, but would also allow Google to introduce a measure of transparency by notifying users whenever search results are removed.
That’s the theory. Unsurprisingly, everything gets a little murkier in practice. In the months since the launch of Google.cn, Adbusters has been intermittently returning to the site to test out a few of China’s most troublesome bugaboos. Filtering is usually obvious. A text search for “Taiwan Independence” was met with about 210,000 results in mid-March; on Google.com, the results numbered over 12,000,000. “Free Tibet” scored 19,600,000 on Google.com, but a paltry 170,000 on Google.cn.
Image: Cult of the Dead Cow [cultdeadcow.com]
While the results on Google.cn were heavily weighted in favour of the government’s official stance, dissenting voices were by no means completely excluded; on a few attempts, image and text searches brought back apparently unfiltered results, with pro-independence opinions dominating, only to revert back to filtered results minutes later.
There’s no telling what accounts for the inconsistent filtering (Technical glitches? Deliberate sedition on the part of Google?). What is clear, unfortunately, is the company’s failure to follow through on its promise to include filtering notification, with neither “Taiwan Independence” nor “Free Tibet” warranting any comment. Only when we pushed one of Beijing’s tenderest buttons, “Tiananmen Square Massacre” - 315 page results, 0 images – did the following appear, in Chinese, tucked rather discreetly at the bottom of the page: “In accordance with local laws, regulations, and policies, a portion of the search results are not shown.”
It is with a certain degree of irony, then, that Google has taken a completely different tack in response to the recent US Department of Justice request that the company fork over search query data along with every url in its index. Not only did Google say no, it said no in a 25-page court document asserting that the government has no right to ask. While Google’s refusal has to do, at least in part, with a desire not to reveal proprietary information about its search algorithms, the move has been lauded by privacy advocates like the American Civil Liberties Union for sending the message that government cannot have free access to private data just because it it deems it necessary.
These dealings with Beijing and Washington are painting a more complex picture of Google than internet users have grown accustomed to seeing. And the lesson for Google itself is pretty clear: sometimes, it’s not so easy to avoid being evil, especially for a behemoth. Let’s all cross our fingers that it doesn’t stop trying.
Clayton Dach
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