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Comment by chc | Hacker News Reader

Your system of morality has an astonishingly low bar for "evil" if "requiring a Google+ account for access to a service" qualifies. I don't think something that harmless would go past "somewhat dickish" for most people. If that's evil, what's the word you use for people who kick puppies or otherwise cause harm to the world?

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The word "Evil" in Google's motto doesn't refer to puppy-kicking or kitten-drowning or armed robbery. It was a reaction to the typical bad behavior of corporations trying to squeeze another couple of points out of their profit margins in customer-hostile ways; to monopolies throwing that monopoly power around; to companies bundling crapware with their goods. Things like that.

Requiring a Google+ account probably still doesn't rise to those levels, but it's a lot closer.

This misunderstanding comes up surprisingly often on HN. It should be pretty clear that "evil" was always meant in the half-joking hacker sense, not some religious judgement of absolute morality on a global scale.

Is outing someone against their will and possibly ruining their life merely "somewhat dickish"?

http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-outed-me/

I'm not saying that annoying people by forcing G+/YT integration is evil. But presuming that an annoyance to you is an annoyance to all is faulty.

There's a line to be drawn between "don't be evil" and "don't do evil". With such a huge organization, things slip through the cracks and accidents happen that result in bad things. But I find it hard to believe that Google decided to out someone.

They were warned about the negative consequences of identity conflation, then built a system that did just that. They didn't "decide" to out someone, but they built a machine for outing people.

No. It's not google's fault people are bigots.

This is like saying "it's not my fault that trains have a lot of mass and kinetic energy", after you are warned against pushing people in front of them and do it anyway.

Not even close. Trains would be quite useless if they did not have a lot of mass and kinetic energy. People should already strive to not be bigots regardless of what google does or doesn't do.

This seems to be a problem with all social networks.

Why is Google being singled out here?

When you operate at Google scale, thinking about morality means trying to anticipate and aggregate the total effect of your actions. Requiring a unified publicly visible and "real name" discoverable identity associated with all (Google-owned) online activity can have huge chilling effects on significant demographics - generally not the demographics deciding these policies, building these systems, or even the most profitable advertising demographics - but large groups of people nonetheless.

Whether that qualifies as "evil" is semantics, but excusing it with a comparison to puppy kicking isn't valid. It's a fundamentally different kind of issue and requires a fundamentally different kind of reasoning.

I've been using Google+ since the first day it was available; I figure about half the people I have circled are not using their real names.

[(People harmed by G+ policy) * ~1/2] is still O(People harmed by G+ policy)

(Also, presumably "half the people you happen to know who joined G+ that you circled" has some selection bias to it.)

In my opinion the use of 'dark patterns' to trick people into signing up to your money making service is 'evil'. The fact that there are worse things in the world doesn't change the fact that they were deceiving people for profit.

I think chc has a good point. The G+ debacle was greedy, annoying, and user-hostile, but _evil_? Really?

The launch of Buzz was definitely somewhere on the thoughtless-evil spectrum, though. A major breach of trust, at the very least.

> The G+ debacle was greedy, annoying, and user-hostile, but _evil_? Really?

If it was greedy, annoying, and user-hostile, then yes--according to the context of Google's motto[1]--it could be considered evil. "Evil" in this case doesn't mean the same thing it does when we're talking about rapists, murderers, and Dow Chemical.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil

> what's the word you use for people who kick puppies or otherwise cause harm to the world?

Well, Google did buy a company that makes military robots....

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