What’s Google Ethics?

In the Google age we are moving from “with freedom comes responsibility” towards "with freedom comes freedom from responsibility”

One day a man called Christian Daily and complained that he kept on appearing as a criminal in an old online article even though he had long done his punishment and had started a new life with a new family and a new job.

He was caught up in his past because a Google search for his name turned up a number of old news pieces on him being convicted to several years in prison. We took out his name from the article but couldn’t do anything about the Google results – apparently he couldn’t get hold of them.

There is something merciless about the radical freedom of information that the internet has created. Something inhuman.

The obvious examples are Google and facebook, the two superpowers of the digital age. They have done a lot of good things – personally I wouldn’t want to live in the time before Google again – but they never behaved very responsibly in the fundamental question which content is worth spreading and which is not.

Democracy was never based on the assumption that all information is equally good or equally appropriate for distributing. Greek democracy wasn’t, American democracy wasn’t and European democracy wasn’t.

What these different variations of democracy all have in common is a fundamental understanding that with freedom comes responsibility. But the digital superpowers seem to turn it into: With freedom comes freedom from responsibility.

This thin notion of democracy and freedom of speech – that all information is worth spreading – has had the consequences that facebook turns its blind eye to horrible hate groups and Google is distributing how to’s on suicide and bombs.

In reality, they turn away from the responsibility of what information does to people. Instead they talk thoughtlessly about free information and the needs of the user. And most of us – also the media – buy the explanations. But it wouldn’t be censorship to prevent suicide.

Saying that they don’t have the time or resources to filter is off course not true. The search quality employees of the company accepted some search results and left out others. Antisemitic and anti-Scientology web sites are among the blocked sites.

Be aware that what you find on the Google is the result of a choice. Google is a moral agent that permits some sites and blocks others. There’s staff for controlling the search results in Denmark too. It is not a full automatic search engine untouched by human hands.

But it is not transparent which ethical principles are behind the filtering. Mostly we are told that the search results are objective and unbiased. Also – we’re told – the world’s most powerful knowledge company has the following principle: Don’t be evil.

You have to give credit to facebook for never having been as devoid of humor as to define themselves as the combatants of evil.

There is something Star War-ish about the morality of the young giants who sort of grew up too quickly for their morality to keep up. They seem to look at themselves as if they are above the corruption of power, as if it were a simple choice not to be evil when you have the greatest control over information in history.

The genius of democracy is that power should be controlled. The genius of Google is to avoid being controlled even though Google is – in every sense of the word – POWER.

All the while the young inventors spend their time and energy on organizing the world’s information. That information can be good or bad seems to be too small a question for them to bother about.

What a distance there is between Googles ambition to organize all the world’s information to the thought that love hides many sins as it is found in Christianity (and in Judaism). Here is an understanding that information can also be terrible mistakes that needs hiding.

Christian history is full of reflections that tiny things – even one look at another person – can mean an enormous responsibility. There is an understanding that some knowledge can destroy and some knowledge can pull through a person. An understanding that knowledge about people is not just knowledge.

Wonder if that kind of reflection keep them awake at night, the colorful business men in Silicon Valley?

Democratization of information is one great thing about our time that you have to be grateful for. But many strong players in the global information market act like moral Peter Pans who don’t stand up to the responsibility linked to being among the most powerful corporations in the world.

“Light without warmth is torture from hell”, wrote Nikolaj Frederik Grundtvig, a Danish poet, in 1824. It still is. If Google’s enlightenment project is not accompanied by an understanding of information that is respectful of the individual – but just regard people as X’s or Y’s in a mathemathical algorithm – it will not be human.

To start out they could answer one simple question and add that answer to the collection of information that seeks to one day know everything about everyone and everything: What are the Google ethics?