It seems the title is implying that the people suing think Google had an obligation to not be evil because that was its motto.
Reading the article, the lawsuit is about something more reasonable: They signed an employee code of conduct which included "Don't Be Evil". They organized a movement within Google in pursuit of contractually obligated motto, and believe they were fired for doing this organizing.
Say you were hired as security. You signed a contract stating you wouldn't let anyone enter the building who doesn't have a valid employee id. One day a VP forgets his ID at home, and puts you in a tough spot. Fearing you'd be fired because you violated your contract, you deny the VP access to the building. The VP is mad, and gets revenge on you by getting you fired. In this case, suing the company for following the rules it made you follow seems reasonable.
The problem here is "Don't Be Evil" is so vague. I'm unsure it will have enough standing to succeed, but it's not entirely unreasonable.
> The problem here is "Don't Be Evil" is so vague.
They're going to have an extremely uphill battle to fight if this is the basis of their legal argument. No reasonable person could understand the phrase, "Don't Be Evil," to mean, "Don't do things that I personally consider evil." For example, I very much doubt that a court is going to find that Customs and Border Protection is "evil," and thus any actions the plaintiffs took against Google's dealings with CBP were contractually mandated by the employment agreement.
To the extent that this is a headache for Google at all, it will serve as a great example as to why legalese and corporate-speak is so common in the U.S. Google tried to have a motto that, while legally ambiguous, expressed a sentiment about how they wanted to treat their users and act in the marketplace. There will be different opinions about how well Google lives up to the motto, but certainly at the time it was coined, that was the idea behind it. And now they're getting sued, essentially frivolously, over the language. If it causes them a problem, it's a lesson to other companies: avoid mottos that are subject to creative and motivated interpretation during litigation. Or to put it another way, don't have mottos.
Even if they don't win, in a public trial, given the current political attitude to Big Tech, this could cost Google billions just in the discovery process.
"Billions" is a very large number, even for elite coders or lawyers that's thousands of person years - or tens of thousands for mere mortals. Somehow I doubt that any company would assign ten thousand people for a civil suit discovery...
Not directly, but the reputational damage ... and the possibility that national governments might be emboldened to act against Google in tax or privacy domains could knock percentage points off the market cap.
Correct, HOWEVER, since these employees also broke other more explicit rules in the employee handbook, then the more specific rules will apply, not the incredibly-vague-obviously-not-a-carte-blanche-to-do-whatever-you-want clause.
Yeah but it's not really a contract, the code of conduct clearly doesn't obligate Google to do anything. It's just a list of basic rules & policies like every other company has, its purpose is to put a bunch of rules in writing and it is signed by new hires so that there's a documented acknowledgement of those policies. That is, a CoC is often the document used when firing someone but is rarely going to help someone keep their job.
A company breaking or changing policy is not by definition unlawful or a violation of any employee's rights in the US. There are exceptions to this, but many people would be blown away at the massive leeway companies have (e.g. only ~20 states consider PTO "earned wages", other states have far lower or no PTO protections on termination).
That said, their lawsuit isn't really about breach of contract, it's just one of the 5 counts they are trying to establish (the complaint is only 13 pages double spaced, totally worth skimming[0]):
COUNT I: BREACH OF CONTRACT
- Plaintiffs say they were fired for following the CoC and calling out evil (working with DHS / CBP / ICE) that Google was doing or considering doing.
COUNT II: PROMISSORY ESTOPPEL
- They would have taken a job elsewhere if they knew "Don't be Evil" wasn't going to be honored and gave up opportunities for no reason since it wasn't.
COUNT III: BREACH OF IMPLIED COVENANT OF GOOD FAITH AND FAIR DEALING
- Basically the same as count 1 but focused on bad faith by changing the policy.
COUNT IV SLANDER/FALSE LIGHT
- Plaintiffs say Google slandered them by falsely saying they leaked confidential information.
COUNT V: TERMINATION IN VIOLATION OF PUBLIC POLICY
- Plaintiffs say they were fired for exercising protected political action and/or for their membership of protected classes.
In my opinion the DHS / CBP / ICE child separation policy is pure evil, so is a lot of the incarceration this country[1], but the lawsuit isn't going to come down to the definition of evil so much as it will come down to California employment law.
Presumably the employment contracts references the CoC, and is thus incorporated in the employment contract, so in theory the CoC could be interpreted under the same rules of contract law. 3 of the 5 counts hinges upon what "Don't be Evil" means, so it looks like (at least on the surface) a major point of contention.
That said I do agree it's an uphill battle to try to get a court to seriously interpret "evil". It's a tautology at best, i.e. "don't do anything you shouldn't do".
> “Don’t be evil.” Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our users. But “Don’t be evil” is much more than that. Yes, it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information. focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services we can. But it's also about doing the right thing more generally ~ following the law, acting honorably and treating each other with respect.
That is pretty specific. You need to provide users unbiased access to information, focus on their needs, and give them the best products and services you can. You also need to follow the law, act honorably, and treat each other with respect.
The courts do in fact understand legally-binding terms to mean something. (See also the fact that IBM's lawyers sought a specific exemption from the JSON license's "The Software shall be used for Good, and not Evil," because they knew there was a chance the courts would find something they did "Evil," because if it's in a contract, it means something.) So what do they mean?
Some of these clauses - "giving them the best products and services we can," "acting honorably," etc. - are a little squishy. But "providing our users unbiased access to information" is pretty clear-cut.
The plaintiffs organized against Dragonfly, a censored version of Google that would provide users biased access to information. IMO they've got a pretty good case that the employee handbook, which they had to abide by to keep their job, told them to do that.
> TBH, I think almost everyone treats the former statement, as meaning the latter. Did you mistype here?
I don't think so. For example, there are religions that consider the lending of money to be evil, but I am quite certain Google did not have in mind that adherents of these religions should leak documents to the press if Google were to offer a credit card. Likewise, Google was not interested in the moral views of its conservative religious employees when it started offering various types of support for LGBTQ people.
I think when most people hear, "Don't be evil," they understand it to mean things along the lines of, "Don't be unfair to users, don't act with malice, don't lie, cheat, or steal, etc." I.e. don't do things that are essentially universally considered evil. I do not believe many people interpret that as, "protest every time Google violates your personal moral code, no matter how esoteric or idiosyncratic."
Those things are clearly ~not~ universally seen as evil in the corporate world (and other places, but the corporate world is the relevant area here), given the prevalence of deception & unfair conduct present.
> Those things are clearly ~not~ universally seen as evil in the corporate world
I mean, we're getting pretty deep into the weeds of what we mean by, "seen as evil" or even "evil" at this point. Which is kinda what I was getting at. I think stealing is universally understood to be evil, even in the corporate world, but people will differ on what stealing actually is, or whether a particular act is stealing. A recent example that comes to mind is the Citibank/Revlon situation. I personally thought that was theft by Revlon, but there are a lot of people who see it another way. I understand that Revlon's employees did not view their behavior as evil, even if it seemed bad to me.
Nearly everyone is righteous in their own eyes. And adults understand this. That's part of why it's my view that most people will understand Google's former motto to not be inclusive of being an activist against Google's interests, even in morally ambiguous cases, and even after being asked not to. I don't really have any way to convey this more clearly, so I guess we'll have to let time, that great prover of claims, tell. Maybe I'm wrong and the court will hand these people a willion dollars. I don't think so.
A reasonable person should understand it not as requesting to make subjective personal judgments but rather as what it clearly was meant as: "Don't be Microsoft"
Lack of history. I worked there and this is correct. The motto originates in the very earliest days of Google when they - like most other software firms - feared Microsoft more than any other company. In particular they feared being locked out of Windows or discouraged via IE defaults, killed the same way Netscape was. This was a big part of the reason for the original Google Toolbar. It was at the height of the Microsoft trial, Gates had been doing a lot of questionable things and there was a general agreement that the company was Bad News. Slashdot's Borg logo dates from this time.
Don't be Evil was basically a kind of jokey collective agreement that Google wouldn't become like Microsoft. Of course twenty years later the industry had grown enormously, Microsoft is no longer the big bad wolf, many working people in tech have no recollection of any of this and in America, exist in an ideological pressure cooker that tells them anything that isn't left wing is "evil". So the motto had been lifted out of its very 90s and software specific context to become a stick for perpetual interns to beat people of the wrong political persuasion.
If this stupidity actually goes anywhere near a serious court case it wouldn't surprise me if this history gets dug up.
Only if said "reasonable person" were around in the 90's, and knew the shit that MS was trying to pull. I happen to be one of those people, but that's not the catch of the day here.
The issue is that they used their own interpretation of "don't be evil", even when the company TOLD them that certain things were not evil.
The phrase is meant to be a catch-all against policies that are not specified - not a carte-blanche to do whatever the F you want in contradiction of what the company is telling you.
Having a motto is fine. Asking your employees to comply with a completely vague and subjective objective in their employment contract is asking for trouble, however.
> They signed an employee code of conduct which included "Don't Be Evil"
No, the more key part is: “[...] everything we do in connection with our work at Google will be, and should be, measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct. [...] And if you have a question or ever think that one of your fellow Googlers or the company as a whole may be falling short of our commitment, don’t be silent.”
There legal allegation is not that the company action was evil. It’s that it was reasonably within the realm of subjectively questionable conduct that the company had, in a binding contract with employees, demanded to be alerted to when employees had concerns, and that therefore retaliating against employees for their internal action consistent with that binding agreement is illegal.
> The problem here is "Don't Be Evil" is so vague.
Exactly, depending on your political viewpoint, "Don't Be Evil" could mean some/all of the following:
- Not doing business with China
- Not doing business with ICE
- Not doing business with any government
- Not doing business with any other business that has currently-employed "evil" (politically incorrect) employees
- Not building ad-tech
- Not building free products where the monetization model involves user tracking
- Not hiring enough minorities
- Not firing "evil" employees (employees who are politically incorrect, who voted for X evil candidate, who don't fall in line with "good" thought/speech, etc)
It could even mean the opposite of each of these, depending on your perspective.
- Maybe it's evil to do business in China, because it requires you to censor search results.
- Or maybe it's evil not to, because you deprive Chinese people of an important utility, and you don't actually make them better off in any other way.
- Maybe doing business with ICE is evil, because kids in cages.
- Or maybe avoiding ICE is evil, because it's unpatriotic or undemocratic!
Every single one of these actions or inactions could be construed to be evil depending upon one's personal values, moral code, or even one's understanding of various contested facts involved in the decision-making!
The vague motto is not the issue; the detailed elucidation of the meaning in the code of content and the positive direction in the CoC (alleged to be, and this is consistent with the legal treatment of similar signed policy documents in employment law, a binding contract) to raise issues when either individual googlers at any level or the company as a whole seemed to be violating the policy as elucidated in that document are the issues.
The specific direction to raise issues if the company as a whole appeared to be in violation cannot be reconciled with the idea that it did not apply to announced official company actions.
And no one refused to do their job. The question is whether the things they were fired for doing were additional to, outside of, and inconsistent with their job or part of their job as specified in a binding contract with their employer.
> or the company as a whole seemed to be violating the policy
There is no requirement for a company to follow principles listed in the CoC.
> And no one refused to do their job.
They refused to stop doing things that were against the CoC, despite being told to do so, and being told that those activities were not consistent with the company's interpretation of Do No Evil.
> The problem here is "Don't Be Evil" is so vague. I'm unsure it will have enough standing to succeed, but it's not entirely unreasonable.
As will be made obvious by the following comment, I am not a lawyer. But, I always think of the modern judicial system as staying away from saying some particular action is "evil" in the moral sense, rather than just illegal, or even ethically wrong in some cases. I think it would really be something if the court admitted a specific definition of evil for the purposes of deciding on this case. In my view of the world, that kind of thing would need a philosophical or theological basis, which you'd think would then be enshrined, to some extent, in precedent. I doubt anything like that would actually happen in this case, but it would sure be weird if it did.
This lawsuit won’t go anywhere. “Don’t be evil” is not a contract, and if it was, they’ll have to convince the court that their definition of evil is the one true definition. This is really just a publicity stunt to get Google to settle to prevent PR damages. It’s highly unlikely that they have any incontrovertible evidence of wrongdoing as defined by law.
I'm not sure this is true. I'm not a lawyer, but it certainly seems that in e.g. https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/first-circuit/malice-requ... courts may consider the notion of "evil" as even more concrete and fundamental than the definition of "malice." Sure, settlement may be the likely outcome, but there's not a zero chance of success on the merits.
I believe that only applies to contracts of adhesion (in most areas), though this contract may be one of adhesion. The presumption would probably be taken to mean that the employee couldn't be fired 'with cause' for 'being evil', but I don't know how you'd prove Google was 'being evil'. This is tantamount to accusing someone of fraud for saying that they 'were nice', but then not 'being nice'.
I don't think it applies strictly to contracts of adhesion, just contracts where a single party was the drafter of the bad term.
This case will not hinge on what the definition of "evil" is, but on whether "don't be evil" was a real term of the contract or some errata in the employee handbook. And even then, the complaint isn't "Google was evil" but rather "Google's handbook said to point out evil when I see it and they fired me for it".
If I worked for Nike could I use "Just Do It" to justify any lapse in judgement? Promote conspiracy theories because Apple tells me to "Think Different"? Be a giant prick at work because EA tells me to "Challenge everything"? Seek damages because "Red Bull gives you wings" didn't literally deliver? Ignore Covid public health protocols because my employer KFC states "It’s finger-lickin’ good"?
This is pretty thin material, specially because they were fired after repeated correction that clarified what they were doing was out of sync with any generic motto.
What does "be" mean? Does it mean "act" or does it mean "exist"? Can a person do something evil without "being" evil? Can you be evil without doing anything evil (yet)? These are questions for philosophers to contemplate, not angry employees who were fired (in their eyes) unjustly.
To me, it's a cash grab masquerading as something more virtuous. They better hope they get a big payout, enough to last them for a long time, because regardless they will be branded as troublemakers who aren't worth the risk of employing.
Prior to this lawsuit, what did you take the old Google motto to mean? Personally, I took it to mean don’t commit evil acts [as a company]. Obviously you can pick it apart now, but it wasn’t derided as some ambiguous concept prior to this lawsuit.
They signed an employee code of conduct which included "Don't Be Evil".
The employee code of conduct, that they were made to sign as a condition of employment has the directive "Don't Be Evil" in it? Did Google legal review that document? Although often made fun of, there is a reason IBM legal required a license change in JSLint to get out of its "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." license clause. Heck, Google Code wouldn't host JSMin-PHP because of that clause ( https://wonko.com/post/jsmin-isnt-welcome-on-google-code ).
> "movement within Google in pursuit of contractually obligated motto"
is factually wrong, and that's what my post demonstrated. They started a movement that had nothing to do with what "don't be evil" meant. It didn't mean "justice for immigrants."
> "The VP is mad, and gets revenge on you by getting you fired"
Also bogus. This sort of thing did happen, and the security guards were celebrated, not fired. Any VP who tried this would himself (or herself) get fired.
> "The problem here is "Don't Be Evil" is so vague"
Wrong. Contract terms are construed by the law. Since Google wrote the contract, their interpretation tends to govern.
> Since Google wrote the contract, their interpretation tends to govern.
Contra proferentem (Latin: "against [the] offeror"), also known as "interpretation against the draftsman", is a doctrine of contractual interpretation providing that, where a promise, agreement or term is ambiguous, the preferred meaning should be the one that works against the interests of the party who provided the wording.
I'm a patent guy, not a lawyer, so this is well outside my zone of competence. A real lawyer could tell us how often Contra proferentem is used in practice, and whether it might apply here.
I wish we had more ability to public remove the bias in titles through effort like this.
This reply is on-point, addresses my immediate suspicion, counters an (assumably intentional) attempt to spread a negative narrative, and is excellently reasoned.
I think the idea is that if the employee is bound to the code of conduct, the company shouldn’t be able to force the employee to act in a way that violates it.
> No, the problem is it’s flatly ridiculous to claim an employee code of conduct binds the company
Not only is it not ridiculous, but that employment policies like CoC’s generally constitute binding contracts (which, inherently, bind both parties) is fairly well established in employment law.
> The problem here is "Don't Be Evil" is so vague.
That should be Google's problem. It would have been better if they had never stated that intention. They used it to ingratiate themselves to Mozilla and Linux users.
(Disclaimer: I wasn't there at the very beginning. I joined in Nov. 2005 when the motto was already in place.)
The origin of "don't be evil" had nothing to do with politics. It had to do, especially, with selling search placement, which was something that search engines before Google regularly did. Whether you bought ads on Search or not had no bearing on where you came out in the Search results, and you can doubt that all you like but it was true.
I'm not AS sure about this one, but another evil practice which inspired the slogan was: giving preference to your own products in search results. Google didn't need to do that back in the day, because it didn't really HAVE any other products. It pretty definitely succumbed to that evil once it had some.
If the case is not tossed, the judge will probably construe the term for the jury, similar to how a patent claim is construed. The two sides will fight over the construction, but the judge's ruling will stand. I'm pretty sure he'd construe "don't be evil" by what it meant to Google, and not what the three ex-employees thought. If they were in doubt, they could have asked.
> It had to do, especially, with selling search placement, which was something that search engines before Google regularly did. Whether you bought ads on Search or not had no bearing on where you came out in the Search results, and you can doubt that all you like but it was true.
Which, with the slow boil of reducing the yellow background of ads down to next to nothing, then moving them ahead of results, and slowly fading the background to nothing, whittling the little "Ad" chip down to nothing [1], is today exactly what Google is doing.
> another evil practice which inspired the slogan was: giving preference to your own products in search results.
Which it absolutely does, and did worse (sued in EU over Google shopping results).
I joined in 2010. At no point did I ever drink the koolaid that Google would ever really live up to this vague ideal, but I was, at the time, impressed by how ethical and careful the company seemed to be. That completely changed, little by little, and I lost that trust, or rather, that trust was broken and slowly evaporated. Today, Google is a behemoth that will seemingly stop at nothing to keep that 20% YoY gravy train going. It's getting ridiculous. They're paving over cyberspace with ads and gobbling every profitable thing and potential competitor. They won't be stopping the growth mindset. The self deception at the top is staggering. Google is becoming everything the internet never should have been.
The whole first page is ads. It's pretty disgusting. The entire apparatus treats every query as having commercial intent, or even if it doesn't, force commercial intent, on users. The abject hunger to monetize literally every interaction you will ever have with a computer is what finally turned my stomach and I really couldn't take it anymore.
I run an adblocker, unapologetically. Even then, you notice the next level of distortion; the search engine will push you to over-optimized ad-laden, super-dumbed down and aggregated sites that are practically devoid of information but loaded with trackers and spying and ads. Google sends you there because it will inevitably send you to what is in its interest, which is either one of its own properties or something participating in the great ad sideshow, all of which are subject to its tax as the biggest monkey in the jungle.
Oh come on. What non commercial results do you expect for a query like "new computers"? Do you really think anyone who searched that is looking for Wikipedia?
Completely unnecessary tone here, but yeah, I do think that some percentage of queries for "new computers" might just be interested in finding out what new computers are out there, and not just buy the first thing shoved in their faces. Stupid search engine rounds up 90 or 95% to 100% and forces everyone to think about buying stuff all the time. It's really grating being lumped into whatever crap category the engine thinks is the most profitable and being shown the result of a bidding war for my attention for every. single. thing. in this life.
While I was there (about a year later) I can remember it being used generally in meetings to judge if something was ethical. I can remember things being nixed (by engineers) for being too “evil”.
Some of those things would probably be okay today - now that Mr Zuckerberg has moved the goalposts for how creepy a company can allow itself to get - and everyone must follow or risk losing out.
>The origin of "don't be evil" had nothing to do with politics.
- "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" - Somebody
- "Most evil are created by those who think themselves as so righteous" - Me
It doesn't really matter what are their intentions. The moment you label yourself as "no evil" ( or Saint ) is the moment some people will absolutely scrutinise the heck out of you. To some ( if not many ) on HN, the act of selling ads itself is "evil".
I will add this Tech / Silicon Valley startup "saving the world" as the force of "Good" started with Google. When the media and PR were hyping Google could do no wrong. Further helping to enhance its image as Saint. ( And possibly good for hiring ). At least I dont see it during IBM or Microsoft era.
It is nice this finally backfire, only 20 years too late. Not sure if I will see the days of things backfire from Apple. I am already old.
although ads clearly do sell search placement, only that those placements are separate and labelled as ads. although over the years the notice that a result is an ad was made less and less obvious. remember when ad results had a yellow background?
Would the fact that they were disciplined repeatedly for their actions and told they were unacceptable be construed as guidance that they were out of line with the intent of "don't be evil"? It doesn't sound like they were fired on the spot but rather reprimanded on numerous occasions which Google most certainly documented. This would all be shared openly in a trial which would likely paint a pretty poor picture of the individuals.
If you go into a proceeding like this, you can expect Google to smear you worse than you ever imagined. I'm not defending this practice, but that's what they'll do.
> Three former Google employees have sued the company, alleging that Google's motto "Don't be evil" amounts to a contractual obligation that the tech giant has violated.
How could anything possibly happen other than getting tossed out of court immediately? They want US courts to adjudicate which acts are and are not "evil"?
Ignore the media reporting around the lawsuit and turn to the complaint itself (it's linked in the first sentence of the article [1]).
The complaint centers on a Code of Conduct that the employees signed, and then that the employees were terminated for speaking out internally about what they felt was a violation of the "don't be evil" motto. I'm not sufficiently familiar with California employment and contract law to know how much of a leg this case has, but on a quick scan, one of the counts (discrimination due to sexual identity) is dead in motion-to-dismiss phase, one (slander) might survive if amended, and the other three will turn on whether or not the Code of Conduct's statements that employees should speak up about perceived violations of "don't be evil" is enough like a contract to make retaliation in firing because of it a violation of contract.
Notably, it never asks the court to decide if its acts were or were not evil. It's not insane enough to be thrown out immediately, but there's several facts about the Code of Conduct I'd want to learn about that aren't in the complaint.
[1] This should be standard practice for anyone reporting on legal cases, and it frustrates me to no end that it is not.
> I'm not sufficiently familiar with California employment and contract law to know how much of a leg this case has, but on a quick scan, one of the counts (discrimination due to sexual identity) is dead in motion-to-dismiss phase,
No such count exists in the complaint! There is a component of Count V of that type but Count V can stand without it.
That said, the other bits in Count V are also fairly weak, though the sex/orientation/identity one is the weakest.
> one (slander) might survive if amended,
Not sure why you say that; while obviously the facts require trial the slander/false light charge seems to make all the necessary claims to establish the tort.
> Not sure why you say that; while obviously the facts require trial the slander/false light charge seems to make all the necessary claims to establish the tort.
Defamation generally is a difficult charge to prove, although I doubt that the plaintiffs qualify as a public figure which makes actual malice (the most difficult element) irrelevant. I don't have a strong sense of how much of the elements of defamation are necessary in the pleading stage, especially the degree to which a pleading statement is fact versus conclusory allegation. In particular, paragraph 49 seems rather conclusory on the nature of damages actually suffered to reputation.
In that sense, if the allegation is deficient in the complaint, it's deficient in a way that an amended complaint would easily fix.
The purpose of the motto isn't to give employees carte-blanche to do whatever they want. It's supposed to be a catch-all for situations that the company has not taken an explicit position on.
If the company says "xyz isn't evil" explicitly, then the motto doesn't give you the right to work against that.
>"There are all sorts of contract terms that a jury is required to interpret: 'don't be evil' is not so 'out there' as to be unenforceable," she said. "Since Google's contract tells employees that they can be fired for failing to abide by the motto, 'don't be evil,' it must have meaning."
Encouraging your employees to be political activists at work, regardless of affiliation, seems firmly in 'stupid games; stupid prizes' territory. I don't think that applies just to progressive activism.
I'm not trying to sound glib, but a court can 'determine' just about anything. Whether or not the ruling continues to stand in light of appeals and other court rulings is another matter. There are all sorts of seemingly bizarre rulings, like a house being declared "legally haunted".
The court doesn't need to determine what it means in an absolute sense, just what Google meant by it (or could reasonably have been presumed to) when they put it in the employment contract.
Not the original poster but I think they mean that the point of the law is to approximate morality and have it consistent across society.
If a court could look at a situation and determine that it is evil, then what is the point of determining whether it is legal or not? What if you came to the conclusion that something is illegal but not evil or evil but not legal? You pretty much undermine the construct of law in the first place and the existence of the court itself
The US government is prohibited from taking a position on religious questions. The nature of evil is such a question. The government frequently declares that something is "bad", but it is not able to declare that something is "evil".
Ah yes, for example the “Axis of Bad” [0] that then-President George W Bush famously named shortly after 9/11. Yes, that prohibition on the Government declaring things to be ‘evil’ is absolutely a real thing that exists in the real world in which we all live.
If Google was able to fire workers for being evil, I think these employees have a case for the reverse as well.
Many contract disputes boil down to the definition of the term "reasonable" so why would "evil" be different? Ultimately it's on Google for including the word in legal documents.
> "If Google was able to fire workers for being evil"
Are you treating that as fact?
Obviously I haven't looked at the paperwork for every fired employee (and probably no one will ever get to), but I think they have some other pretext. "<employee> was fired for being evil" is not a phrase you'll ever find.
It's right there in their code of conduct[1] that employees can be fired not just for being evil, but for "seeing something that [they] think isn't right" and not speaking up.
> Failure of a member of our extended workforce or other covered service provider to follow the Code can result in termination of their relationship with Google.
> don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
That's a good point. You see phrases such as "consent shall not be unreasonably withheld" in contracts. It's common in leases, where you can sublet with the consent of the landlord. Court decisions in this area are not consistent.
Are you saying I hae a case against my company because they are incompetent. I would be fired for incompetence, so I should be able to sue my employer for the vauge crime of being incompetent for say ... $100million?
This is what happens when people are radicalized by their feelings. I'm confident that their hearts are in the right place, but give me a break. If you work at Google, you should have the sense that this kind of flimsy case is going nowhere at all.
>But the plaintiffs' lawyer, Laurie Burgess, said it is not beyond what courts regularly must decide.
Sounds like the lawyer is taking them for a ride on their dime, imo.
IANAL either, but this isn't nearly as crazy as I thought it'd be based on the headline.
They basically say don't be evil was part of the employment contract (via the code of conduct), the employees fulfilled their obligation to advise Google not to be evil, and then Google fired them.
From wikipedia:
The elements of promissory estoppel are:
* an express or implied promise;
* detrimental reliance by the promisee foreseeable to a reasonable person in the promissor's position;
* actual detrimental reliance by the promisee (worsening of their position); and
for specific performance (as opposed to reliance damages), injustice can only be avoided by enforcing the promise.
Point by point:
* Google promised to not be evil because every employee (including the CEO and members of the board) agrees to the code of conduct.
* The promisee (employees) relied on that when they made their decition to work at google and enter the contract. That was reasonably foreseeable by the promissor (Google).
* The employees actually did rely on the promise when they took the job, and circulated the petition to not be evil, since they were promised all employees agreed to it. No comment on the specific performance remedy since I didn't read that far to see if that's what they're demanding.
Obviously there's points in there that could be reasonably debated, but it seems not-crazy enough to make it past a motion to dismiss.
You're talking about the promissory part, but not the estoppel part. Estoppel is the court's action to intervene to prevent the defendant from evading its obligation. It has to be a valid promise that the defendants relied on to get the court to take the action of estoppel.
If something seems like a dumb case mostly designed to enrich the plaintiff attorney on the face of it, it most likely is a dumb case mostly intended to enrich the plaintiff attorney.
"Don't be evil" falls pretty neatly under the definition of an illusory promise because it is "indefinite or vague."
Under the Restatement (Second) of Contracts:
"Illusory promises; mere statements of intention. Words of promise which by their terms make performance entirely optional with the “promisor” whatever may happen, or whatever course of conduct in other respects he may pursue, do not constitute a promise."
The fact that the plaintiff attorney did not mention the concept of an illusory promise does not bode well for its chances, because the judge will certainly bring it up, and the defense will also certainly bring it up. This should have been addressed directly, since it is the most obvious defense to this claim. There are other defenses as well that were not brought up and addressed, such as that the nonsense claims related to media articles had any bearing whatsoever on any alleged breach of contract.
Notwithstanding this, "Don't Be Evil" should have never been in any official code of conduct; it should have stayed in the realm of puffery to avoid exactly this type of problem. This is why everyone hates lawyers and other assorted 'fun police' personalities. This was a lazily written complaint that did not really get into the important nitty gritty of why these particular employees were injured.
Further, maybe this is one of those California things that lets you get out of arbitration, but these employees are almost certainly bound by an arbitration agreement. Not mentioning why you get to dodge the forced arbitration clause in your contract in the complaint is annoying to the court and will also make it less likely to survive the obvious motion to dismiss due to the binding arbitration requirement.
>(f) Nothing in this section is intended to invalidate a written arbitration agreement that is otherwise enforceable under the Federal Arbitration Act (9 U.S.C. Sec. 1 et seq.).
Google employees to my knowledge usually get lassoed with arbitration agreements. Not unheard of for plaintiff attorneys to sell clients who are bound by arbitration on a lawsuit that cannot survive the motion to dismiss on that basis.
I'm inclined to agree, however if you remove the feelings from the situation - it doesn't seem much different to any other contractual obligations - like the amount and frequency of their wage payments.
If your contract stipulates that you (and your employer) should "do no evil" without supplying a definition for "evil" then it really isn't that much different to any other contractual breach. Also, you'd have to be stupid to put that in an actual contract.
I'd be surprised if this weren't a case taken on contingency (that is, where the lawyer only gets paid if the plaintiff wins or gets a settlement). The lawyer could still benefit from fame/notoriety even if they lose, but their incentives are generally aligned with the plaintiff's.
Why not? There's this case that went all the way to the supreme court:
>The issue is that, before the 2008 global financial crisis, Goldman had gone around saying things like “our clients’ interests always come first” and “integrity and honesty are at the heart of our business.” Then the global financial crisis occurred, and:
> 1. It came out that maybe Goldman’s clients’ interests sometimes came second, and maybe integrity and honesty were sometimes not quite at the heart of its business[1]; and
> 2. Goldman’s stock price went down.
>[...]
>Perhaps in 2007, investors read in Goldman’s disclosures that “our clients’ interests always come first” and “integrity and honesty are at the heart of our business,” and they thought: “Yes, it is good that Goldman has integrity and puts its clients’ interests first, that is valuable for its business, we will buy the stock.” In 2009, after Abacus and so forth, investors thought “alas, no, Goldman does not have integrity and does not put its clients’ interests first, we are disappointed, we will sell the stock.” In other words, perhaps investors ascribed value to Goldman’s statements about integrity and honesty, and then when they found out that those statements were not true that value went away and the stock went down.
> I'd also imagine you'd have a pretty hard time convincing a US court that working with a US government agency is "evil."
The case isn't asking a US Court to find that. It is asking a California State Court to find that challenging corporate involvement in a particular federal action on the same moral grounds that the State of California was challenging the underlying federal action at the same time was reasonably either or a combination of (a) within the ambit of an obligation undertaken to raise potential “evil” actions, or (b) legally protected political activity, or (c) legally protected discussion of working conditions.
(And there's a couple other things in it that could succeed even if those all fail, notably the slander charge about knowingly false information spread about involvement in public leaks.)
I would for the sake of argument stipulate that "evil" means something, that a court might be able to adjudicate it, and that CBP does many specific things which might be deemed evil.
However, even given all of that, I do not believe it is possible for Google to exist without being complicit with the overall purpose of CBP.
I don't see any particularly salient dividing line between generically working with them and not.
There might be something evil about the details of the particular project, but if CBP as a whole is evil, I don't comprehend how working with them automatically makes a difference when you are based in the US anyway.
I can swallow "a US court adjudicating which acts are evil" much easier than "a US court adjudicating which major parts of the US government are generally evil".
The latter seems like some sort of propaganda fantasy, a snake eating its tail.
I've heard of many big companies not wanting to use JSON-license licensed software for this reason (too much legal risk) - https://www.json.org/license.html
Douglas Crockford has been very willing to give special license to use things for evil; you just have to ask. (May not be good enough for Debian, I guess)
The judge should quote Eliphas Levi on what evil is. IIRC, Levi argues that evil is about abandoning reason, for reason is what makes us different from animals.
Wait, what does reason mean precisely then? This sounds half-baked. Let's say I have the preverbial lever which kills someone but gives me a million dollars. Is it reasonable for me to increase my own utility by pressing the lever? Thus would Levi say it's not evil to do so?
Exactly. What you've described isn't evil. What would be evil is creating a society for those people where all truth is suppressed, all irrationality is praised, good deeds are punished and amoral behavior is rewarded. Basically, making that society as backwards as possible. And if in a few generations people there will embrace that order, because they don't know any better, and start descending into animalism, that would be an example of evil. In other words, evil operates at the soul level, so if you reject the idea of soul, you won't be able to come up with evil or good plans: all acts will be superficial.
My beliefs aside for the sake of argument, one could claim the evil all falls to the person devising that contraption and issuing the reward for that decision.
That seems to let one off the hook. Suppose that if person X dies you inherit his million-dollar wealth. We're out camping and you have the opportunity to do him in. So YOU'RE not evil in taking that opportunity: but rather, what, the campground is evil for making the opportunity happen, or the legal system is evil for permitting inheritance and not universal surveillance?
Eliphas Levi is wrong then. That premise is far too thin to stand, it drops scope.
Stalin [insert very bad historical person here] could have certainly utilized reason in the course of pursuing evil actions for example. The scope there is narrowed down to specific actions. If you broaden back out, you can say that Stalin is acting irrational by committing heinous acts in the first place, but that's only the case if you're defining the standard of what is good on his behalf (as opposed to what he may consider good to be). You'd be imposing your standard, the foundation of your morality, on him.
Morality depends on first defining the standard of what the good is. From there you can extrapolate the rest, you can construct a system forward. Stalin and I will disagree on the standard of what the good is, and as such we'll reach different conclusions on a lot of things. From his standard, he can take rational actions, make rational decisions that align with his aims - they're rational as it pertains to what he's pursuing, what his standard is.
One can entirely disagree with the standards that someone else holds, of course. Their behavior may be evil by your standard for example, and vice versa. You could argue that there is one objective standard for The Good (thus everyone else not following that is immoral to the degree they diverge), however good luck convincing most people to go along with that (it'll never happen).
Is putting these people in a gulag rational? Well that depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
That's some very elaborate dialectics here, but you need to keep in mind that Levi wasn't a modern philosopher, he was a famous occultist and in those circles good and evil are defined very clearly, like the north and the south poles.
The judge would say "what laws were specifically broken?" Then toss it out when the plaintiffs come up empty handed. If the case somehow did get through, they would have to justify how their own repeated violations of Google's data security policies, which led to their terminations, would put them in the right. They would have a hard time of showing that they themselves are clean of evil.
This is a civil case, where the causes of action arise either from contractual violations or from private rights of action authorized by law. The counts alleged are "breach of contract", "promissory estoppel", "breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing" (all three of which are essentially saying "Google legally promised they wouldn't do something they did, and it hurt me"), defamation, and, uh, "termination in violation of public policy" (which is basically saying it violates employment discrimination laws, and is at best poorly drafted in the complaint).
In this case, the tossing out would be along the lines of "the facts alleged in the complaint are, even if true, insufficient to let you bring this lawsuit" (or, more succinctly, "failure to state a claim [upon which relief can be granted]").
The law isn't unrelated to stopping evil, but it isn't able to determine what evil is.
Whether an act is "evil" is a theological question, so to the extent plaintiffs are actually relying on the word "evil", separation of church and state will prevent the court from even considering their claims.
Evil is a personal concept, nobody thinks they themselves are evil outside of a few extremely rare exceptions that mostly involve severe mental illness. Good and evil would appear meaningless and arbitrary to a alien, a strange custom invented by a primitive people.
Why would one ever default to believing aliens are likely to be highly enlightened? It's as likely that they're just lucky with resources, location, timing. They might be savages that primarily jump forward in technology by constantly fighting wars amongst themselves.
The aliens observing our supposed primitiveness are just the ones that came out on top in their latest civil war and went out exploring using the technology that the 14,000 years of war cultivated.
Maybe they're the most obnoxious, spoiled, entitled assholes you could ever imagine. Luck rolled their way ten thousand times in a row and they act like it.
There's absolutely no good reason to default to believing aliens are likely to be far more enlightened than we are.
>> There's absolutely no good reason to default to believing aliens are likely to be far more enlightened than we are.
There's no good reason to imagine some civilisation has figured out how to cross the vast interstellar distances and then pop in to see us during their lifetime.
Since we are already in the realm of pure fantasy, it doesn't alter the argument's validity to also assume these magical creatures are enlightened.
I don't assume they are enlightened, I assume they are just as random as us. They will eat children for dinner and speak entirely in curse words, and our customs will seem just as insane to them.
If you go back a couple hundred years and talk to the people then I imagine you could achieve a similar effect. They were just as certain they were correct as we are, and they are just as wrong.
> Whether an act is "evil" is a theological question
Whether challenging an act is within the reasonable scope of a contractual obligation to report suspected evil is, however, not a theological question, and does not involve deciding the question of whether the act is, in fact, evil, whether or not that is a theological question (it is not, necessarily, it is a moral question.)
The question is not if Google committed evil. The question is if the Google fired employees for telling Google it was comitting evil. This does not require any definition of evil nor any judgement on Google doing evil.
I wonder which side is required to define "evil" in this case? Probably Google's lawyers... Might be interesting what they come up with... If it ever gets to that point.
IANAL, but isn't / shouldn't the process be the following: Google's lawyers drafted the employment contract and used the word evil. Now it is up to the employees lawyers to argue for an interpretation of the word, and if that interpretation is reasonable, then it stands?
Relation: The JSLint license has a clause stating that it shall not be used for evil. IBM has obtained a license to be able to use JSLint for evil, presumably to avoid this type of suit: https://youtu.be/-C-JoyNuQJs?t=41m20s
I thought they were fired for somehow getting chrome to pop-up notices when visiting the website of a google contractor that was anti-union.
I mean, I like the effort, but... it's unlikely that an employer is going to want to pay employees to do things they don't want to have done?
"Her suspension began just three hours after she published a piece of code that created a pop-up notification when Google employees visited the website of IRI Consultants"
I'm curious how one even gets chrome to monitor and pop up a notice when google folks visit a website. If it was some kind of ad that seems OK. If she used google's infrastructure to push a popup to all google employees... do other businesses permit this? Can a chase employee push something to all chase.com users alerting them to something they care about?
I feel this case will backfire on the ex-employees. Instead of explaining the evil that Google is doing, it'll put focus on why the employees were fired. I'm sure that Google has a very detailed file on reasons for the firing (vs. just laying them off etc.) and those reasons were review by lawyers.
Google's revenge will be to display those reasons every time a potential employer google's their names.
Fascinating. You'd think you'd have to be in some kind of security type role to be able to do this if they had access / control over an extension on google employee computers.
Kind of funny seeing maybe some google naivete and the "do no evil" thing come back to bite google.
When I was in high school I had a fair bit of fun going outside the permitted guidelines. By college I'd developed a reasonable sense of boundaries with other folks equipment / jobs with a trust element.
If I pushed a pop-up notice out company wide with a message my employer didn't approve of, I'd definitely be expecting to be going out the door rather than doing the litigation process.
Having worked a bit in govt interesting to see the NLRB pursue this, in govt my experience was a REDICULOUSLY dim view would be taken of something like this.
> If I pushed a pop-up notice out company wide with a message my employer didn't approve of, I'd definitely be expecting to be going out the door rather than doing the litigation process.
If it were relating to anything other than labor organization, it would be a no brainer. But there are special legal protections for labor organization, so I not sure it's clear cut in this particular circumstance.
> You'd think you'd have to be in some kind of security type role to be able to do this if they had access / control over an extension on google employee computers.
There are a lot of employee-written extensions at Google, published in an internal Chrome web store. I even wrote one in a few days and published it. Some of them are owned by teams in one way or another, but a surprising amount of developer tooling at Google is somebody's side project.
>Google fired the three workers... for "clear and repeated violations" of the company's data security policies. The four deny they accessed and leaked confidential documents...
Surely if they can prove they didn't leak anything (or Google can't prove they did), they would have an easy wrongful termination lawsuit? They wouldn't need to sue on these flimsy grounds?
If you whistle-blow when your company does "evil" things... and you're fired for being "evil" (company claims whistleblowing is evil) then this could actually be a case with more merit than "that big company is evil but they said they werent" which is how most people are reading the title.
In this case a security person appears to have used their position to change chrome for google users to display a message when they visited a website of a contractor google was working with (that was anti-union, the employee presumably being pro-union).
This sounds like a stunt someone who hadn't gone to college yet might pull, but this person was a google engineer in a position of trust / authority - not sure how the google hiring process works but she made it in.
I mean, no business is going to willing let one employee hijack the browser used by their users to spread a message the company doesn't like. Most businesses make this very clear - you can't use company resource to spread your messages (political, MLM, side hustles, religious etc).
Reminds me of the JSLint case, where the author said "this software can't be used for evil", and then a bunch of lawyers from IBM couldn't figure out what "evil" meant and demanded a change in the license.
Well the definition of evil is being immortal and wicked. https://stallman.org/google.html has a list of many wicked things that Google has done and there's many others. So maybe they could use some of those things as proof that Google has betrayed the DBE motto. I doubt that anything will come of of this or that a judge won't dismiss this in a quick matter.
In fairness "Don't be evil" isn't really a meaningful goal, it's so vague as to be meaningless. E.g. I'd be surprised if any decision got reversed because it went against it.
Google can easily prove they were evil even at the time they first deployed that corporate motto.
It's interesting to me that we fell for this at the time. I mean if someone says to you at a party "I'm a nice guy" well it's obvious they're a bloody monster...but a corporation doing the same thing and early noughties me is like "well that sounds nice".
NPR indicates the key substantive issue is whether the workers improperly leaked data. The workers say they didn't, factually, leak data (apparently). The 'Evil' bit would allow the workers to present evidence at trial of the substantive right or wrong of what Google was doing, whereas it's irrelevant to vanilla issues of data security. Attorneys structure complaints like this every day of the week, and it's functioning precisely as intended-- NPR ran an article about 'Evil'.
Haha, this is funny. On one hand, I can't help feel a bit of schadenfreude for Google being harassed with this frivolous lawsuit because of their obviously self-indulgent motto. On the other hand, it is a bit sad that the county even accepted such a frivolous lawsuit. On the gripping hand, I don't like the sort of people who pretend to be shocked SHOCKED! that the motto was nothing but a fig leaf. So it's weirdly uncomfortable feelings for me all around.
While I can't speak to the case, I have anecdotally known PhD-level researchers who have cited "don't be evil" as part of their decisions to trust Google with potentially sensitive data. The phrase has clout.
This has been official policy. It seems like more than a motto at that point.
I don't understand how anyone can reach early adulthood and actually take such drivel from a corporation at face value. As you say, clearly such people exist. It just mystifies me.
In the Code of Conduct they signed, was "evil" actually defined? Usually contracts go to great lengths to define every single term that is used, even obvious ones. If "evil" was not defined, then who gets to decide its definition for the purposes of enforcing the contract, the writer, or the signer?
Seems Google employees might now have two ways of making money. Once while at Google. And then suing Google after leaving. If they prevail I expect that a lot of other companies will become targets.
> The trio say they thought they were behaving in accordance with that principle when they organized Google employees against controversial projects, such as work for U.S. Customs and Border Protection during the Trump administration. The workers circulated a petition calling on Google to publicly commit to not working with CBP.
Plenty of people don't subscribe to the belief that it's evil to detain people illegally entering a country. Try overstaying your tourist visa in another country: you'll be arrested, then deported. Same deal with doing Pentagon contracts, as mentioned later in the article. Not everyone subscribes to the belief that any defense-related work is evil. I seriously doubt that this will even be allowed to get to court.
This lawsuit seems more like activism than a credible legal challenge.
The code of conduct or a motto is not a contract.
The code of conduct generally limits the conduct of the employee, and does not create obligations for the company.
When "Don't be Evil" is in the code of conduct, it only suggest that the employee should not engage in evil behavior, but doesn't preclude the company from doing so, and doesn't implicitly allow all non-evil behavior by the employee.
It seems the code of conduct in this case said employees should raise issues to Google. The claim is that google then fired employees for raising issues around google being evil. It has absolutely zero to do with Google actually doing evil or not doing evil.
I don't see in the article that the code of conduct asked employees to call out the company. Maybe you have some other source or have read the complaint? The facts in the article make the suit seem meritless.
The problem with "Don't Be Evil" is that it assumes everyone agrees on what the definition of "evil" is. But that is absolutely not the case. We live in a post-Christian/post-religious society where - aside from the basic human instinct of survival - no one agrees on First Principles. The dominant ideology in society now is Liberalism. And I don't mean American liberalism. I mean actual Liberalism - freedom of speech, expression, assembly, religion, etc. Because of this, there is a diversity of thought and moral relativism, so "evil" means different things to different people. A rural, socially conservative Christian's idea of "evil" will likely be very different than an urban, secular, and progressive definition of "evil." Without a dominant ideology guiding society using a set universal moral code, there will always be conflicts regarding First Principles, different sets of facts, etc.
I think a socially conservative Christian's definition of evil is almost the same as that of a secular progressive. Moral relativism is about using a small grey area as an example for how the massive overlap is wrong.
Sure, but there's a huge gap between "we all precisely agree on what 'evil' means and 'nobody has a clue what evil means'.
It's pretty unreasonable for somebody to say "I personally think this is evil so I can't be fired for refusing to do it, even though I'm the only one", but it's a lot more reasonable if most people would agree that it is in fact evil.
I could see a judgement for the former employees if Google were helping an authoritarian government identify and punish dissidents. Working with US customs? Probably not.
You make a good attempt at joking here, but ultimately fail. Your absurd position: "we live in a post-Crhistian/post-religious society" is just way way too far as an initial gambit. Maybe try toning it down at first? Or alternately going way further at the start. This just hits poe's law too hard.
I agree with your point but i'm not sure i agree that people disagree on first principles that much, and i think people mostly pay lip-service to liberalism more than practice and believe it.
Fixed it for you :) jk but why do people feel the need to make political points out of nothing. You could find tons of examples of things that are evil and not just the few things that fit one persons viewpoints.
I want to be clear that im explicitly against the policy of doing that, but it doesnt look like the person you replied to made any mention of that either.
What about when it’s in your employment contract that you can be fired for “being evil”, and that you’re expected to speak up if you perceive the company “doing evil”, and then you’re terminated for speaking up over perceived “evil” actions by the company?
Does it form “a contract” then? Because that’s what the suit in the article is alleging, by my reading.
Reading the article, the lawsuit is about something more reasonable: They signed an employee code of conduct which included "Don't Be Evil". They organized a movement within Google in pursuit of contractually obligated motto, and believe they were fired for doing this organizing.
Say you were hired as security. You signed a contract stating you wouldn't let anyone enter the building who doesn't have a valid employee id. One day a VP forgets his ID at home, and puts you in a tough spot. Fearing you'd be fired because you violated your contract, you deny the VP access to the building. The VP is mad, and gets revenge on you by getting you fired. In this case, suing the company for following the rules it made you follow seems reasonable.
The problem here is "Don't Be Evil" is so vague. I'm unsure it will have enough standing to succeed, but it's not entirely unreasonable.