A few months ago, Google quietly removed “Don’t be evil” from its code of conduct, and as we learn more about its activities, it’s increasingly easy to see why.
On Monday, Google announced the sudden shuttering of its Google+ social media network, but it wasn’t done entirely voluntarily. The Wall Street Journal had broken the news that the platform had a security bug for about two years that affected hundreds of thousands of people—and Google leaders had decided to keep it a secret so they didn’t look bad.
A software glitch in the social site gave outside developers potential access to private Google+ profile data between 2015 and March 2018, when internal investigators discovered and fixed the issue, according to the documents and people briefed on the incident. A memo reviewed by the Journal prepared by Google’s legal and policy staff and shared with senior executives warned that disclosing the incident would likely trigger “immediate regulatory interest” and invite comparisons to Facebook’s leak of user information to data firm Cambridge Analytica.
It obviously backfired, because now they look even worse.