The U.S. Senate held the infamous Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 for the purpose of finding any communists in the government. During that process, Senator McCarthy trashed the reputation of many good and decent people. Finally, one of the lawyers, Joe Welch, could no longer tolerate the abuse and confronted the Senator with “Have you no sense of decency?”
That’s the way I think about Google! Do they have any sense of decency at all?
You may recall a few years ago that Google set out to map every block in America photographically. It was called “Street View.” They used especially equipped vehicles like this:
Driving to the gym one day, I saw the vehicle mapping my neighborhood and marveled at the technology it must have contained. Unlike some people, I was not bothered by the fact a person/stalker could know what your house looked like before he got there.
Now, we learn those vehicles may have contained devices that accessed unsecured wifi. This allowed Google to know such things as whether the residents were writing emails to lovers, looking up personal medical questions, balancing their checkbooks, managing their retirement portfolios, or even their all-important passwords and past browsing history. Google has assured us that this information was not used. Doesn’t that make you feel better?
Google has apologized, calling it accidental eavesdropping, and alleges it was not illegal. A 25-page report by the FCC, released April 13th, agreed. My first question is why wasn’t it illegal? My second question is don’t ethics matter?
Further investigation into this is obstructed by the fact that the Google engineer in charge of this project has taken the fifth amendment to protect himself. Emails seem to indicate that at least one senior manager knew about this data-mining of ordinary citizens for two years.
There are even unconfirmed rumors that Google is working on ways to both see and hear inside homes by use of the webcam and webmic on most home computers. Would Google actually go that far, to gather information on you for their advertisers? Why wouldn’t they?
In answer to my own question about Google’s decency, I expect they have as much decency as you have privacy.
This weekend, a friend sent me an interesting article that Google was so worried about the highly-competitive and highly-stressful working conditions in the company that it was holding a series of “mindfulness stress reduction” classes.
Maybe, they could decrease their stress by increasing their decency?