An insider's account of his six years at Google throws up little that is liable to tarnish the company's reputation
Most of the time I try not to think about how much I rely on Google. "You know what Google does," Douglas Edwards writes in his relentlessly upbeat memoir of working at the company for six years. "It finds stuff on the internet." But it does so much more than that. I use its email and instant messaging platforms, Gmail and Google Talk, to communicate with friends and family; if I want to find out how to get somewhere, I look on Google Maps; I keep track of the headlines on Google News; I look up foreign words on Google Translate; I watch videos on YouTube; I pay for things online using Google Checkout.
In return for these services, for which users pay nothing, we passively give Google access to a huge amount of information about ourselves, which allows them to target us with tailor-made advertising, a business that last year brought in nearly $30bn. What Google does, essentially, is organise vast quantities of information. It appears to do this for the benefit of people who want to find stuff on the internet; in fact it does it for the benefit of businesses that want to find customers.
The information is indelibly stored in what is airily known as Google's "cloud", a gigantic network of computers stored in enormous sheds, or "server farms", at secret locations around the globe. You might be able to spot them on Google Earth, but you'd have to know where to look. It may seem ironic that a company so apparently cavalier with the privacy of others – all those intrusive Street View cameras peering through everyone's curtains – should be so protective of its own. But then it's also protecting the privacy of everyone who has ever used any of its services.
The company apparently has plans to move its server farms offshore, taking the "cloud" beyond the reach of any country's legal jurisdiction. Only a paranoid person would think that was part of Google's intention, however. Its overquoted motto, after all, is: "Don't be evil", a creed that Edwards assures us the firm lives up to. A devastating exposé by a disgruntled industry insider this isn't.
Edwards, the 59th person to be hired by Google, worked in marketing and "consumer brand management" for the firm between 1999 and 2005, but he didn't come up with the "don't be evil" slogan. In 2001, though, he did include it in a list of "Ten Things We've Found to Be True", which earned the company "a handful of kudos from users for our stand in favour of integrity".
The piece of copy he's most proud of, however, is the health warning he wrote when the Google toolbar was launched. "Please read this carefully. It's not the usual yada yada. By using the advanced features version of the Google toolbar, you may be sending information about the sites you visit to Google." The toolbar's creator, Eric Fredricksen, "agreed that talking to people about privacy upfront would reassure them nothing sinister lurked in the shadows".
This serious and profound stuff is leavened by hilarious stories of software engineers dousing each other with "bazooka-sized water guns" and getting outrageously drunk on corporate ski trips, all structured around the uplifting tale of Google's precipitous ascent.
Edwards was made redundant six months after the firm's stock went public. He's not bitter; quite the reverse. But he might have written a more interesting book if he was.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/04/feeling-lucky-confessions-google-review
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