Back in the day, when Google was a young company doing mostly internet searching, they had a motto "Don't Be Evil". With that, the founders of the tech giant wanted to assure people, that their giant was far nicer than those others technology octopuses strangling the world with their greedy tentacles.
The world has come a long way since that motto. So far, that it's not really the motto of the company anymore, as the powers that be have noticed, that a lot of the things they are doing are far from nice. Some of them are even borderline evil.
What really is driving Google fully from borderline to full-blown evil are their plans with the search engine codenamed "Dragonfly". This particular piece of technology is aimed at China market, from where Google has tried for years to get a foothold. What makes this project evil at its core is, how it works, at least if the leaks are to be believed.
"Dragonfly" is not only a search engine, it is aimed to be a gigantic catalogue machine, that stores the information of the searches that are done as well as the information of the person who does that search. Along with the data the location and the phone number of the person are saved as well, making it easy to track everything people using the service are doing. It also censors out everything the official in China don't want people to see.
This isn't a case, where a company can hide behind "we are not responsible if our technology is used wrong"-defence. This tech is tailor-made to make it easy for the Chinese government to track what people think, which makes the lives of dissenters even tougher in a country where thinking out of the line is already a risky notion.
If Google ever publishes and puts "Dragonfly" in use, they do so at the expense of actual human lives. It isn't a tool, that can be claimed to "make living easier". It is a tool that can be linked as a mechanism of oppression.
Google already is tracking its user very carefully. They know exactly if you are logged in, what you search. They even know it if you aren't logged in, as they have enough data to link things together. But with Dragonfly they are knowingly and willingly begin to teeter towards genuine misuse of the data, that they gather, with no regard on if the data will get people jailed or even possibly killed in the hands of a government that isn't very keen to let people disagree with them.
And if that's not evil, I don't know what is.
Even if the heads at Google are blindly believing it's all about money, it's not. "Dragonfly" goes far beyond "earning a buck". It is going towards human rights violation.
P.S. I am fully aware of the fact that I am writing this on a platform owned by Google. Oh, the irony.
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