Current Events > When did Google become evil?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Back in the 90s and early 2000s, they were seen as the laid back, cool place to work at. Then suddenly (at least from my perspective), the perspective shifted from them becoming the data collecting evil corporation.

When did the perception change and what was the turning point?

Without looking too deeply into it, I imagine whenever they became publicly traded was when the shift initially started. That's kind of a pattern with companies.

Eric Schmidt?

When they were created.

When they got rid of thier "Don't be evil" slogan was probably a turning point.

Its always like that.

Start small, be cool, attract good faith, then they get so big that it is impossible to please investors so they eat everything.

April 2001 was when they realized the data they were collecting from people using Google search could be used to create individual and unique profiles.
After 9/11 is when surveillance data became extremely interesting to government intelligence agencies. Along with changes to the law and key contracts and deals struck with the government in 2003, 2004, 2007, and 2009, Google went from a company not knowing how to make money from a search engine to becoming the world's largest data harvester and monitor.

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/YcoPwgLISW

Looks to be about 7 years ago.

When they murdered Jeeves.

As a kid we would talk about how it was kind of worrisome that Google not only had access to the world's largest source of free information, as well as fully realized 3D maps of the entire planet. So at least in the early 2000s there was definitely anti-google sentiment. And that was before we even really knew about NSA and data harvesting programs.