I'm simply stunned by Google's public refusal to talk to CNET News.com reporters for one year in retaliation for an article that CEO Eric Schmidt: was worth an estimated $1.5 billion last year. Earlier this year, he pulled in almost $90 million from sales of Google stock and made at least another $50 million selling shares in the past two months as the stock leaped to more than $300 a share. He and his wife Wendy live in the affluent town of Atherton, Calif., where, at a $10,000-a-plate political fund-raiser five years ago, presidential candidate Al Gore and his wife Tipper danced as Elton John belted out "Bennie and the Jets." What is Google thinking? This is one more example where a companies efforts to silence critics results in what could only be called a PR disaster.
I have two thoughts on this.
First, so much for "don't do evil." I can think of few evil-er things than using access as a tool to distort press coverage. My sense is that the people who work at Google are good people, but they are no better judges of what is evil than the good people that work at any large multi-national company. PR people there have to heed the whims of their bosses just like workers elsewhere. Contrary to their public image, and some of their most ardent employees beliefs, just because Google does something, doesn't make it not evil. Now we have a clear cut example of this. I am open to feedback, but I don't see any gray area here. Schmidt is CEO of a company where their main product makes private information more widely available than ever before. For him to leverage his power as CEO of a company in the public eye to protect information about himself from being disclosed, while average joes have no leverage to do so, is a farce and plain wrong.
Which brings me to my second point. I'm really interested in whether increased ease of access to information should affect decisions about what information should be made public. For example, our fellow Elaine Newton has written about how police blotters are now available online in many states, when previously they were only available on paper in courthouses. This is great for journalists and others who shed light on government workings by researching these materials. It is not so great for individuals who may have been charged with a crime that is later dropped -- that charge still exists online, available to anyone who is interested.
I don't think the appropriate rule would prevent those documents from being online (I start from the principle that everything should either be accessible or not, independent of means of access), but maybe the fact that the distribution model creates less friction means that the balancing of access vs. privacy is different. Before, individuals retained some privacy protections because it was hard to access the data. Now, those protections are gone, so perhaps the countervailing access levels should be altered.
The blotter case might be easy, because all government documents should be available to the public (I accept this from a speech perspective, but I’m not totally convinced it is right from the privacy angle). But if personal information like the information CNET printed is so easily accessible by tools like Google, maybe there should be laws protecting Schmidt’s privacy interest in this matter. Here, maybe the access should inform the substantive privacy rule.
That said, until I see Schmidt lobbying for these types of protections for people whose private information is freely accessible to CNET reporters and the rest of the world, I remain convinced that “he did do evil.”