Google employees fill the Harry Bridges Plaza in front of the Ferry Building during a walkout on Thursday, November 1, 2018, in San Francisco.
Eric Risberg / AP
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Eric Risberg / AP
Google employees fill the Harry Bridges Plaza in front of the Ferry Building during a walkout on Thursday, November 1, 2018, in San Francisco.
Eric Risberg / AP
Three former Google employees sued company, alleging that Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto is tantamount to a contractual obligation the tech giant breached.
By the time the company hired three software engineers, Rebecca Rivers, Sophie Waldman and Paul Duke, they had signed codes of conduct that included a “Don’t be evil” clause, according to the lawsuit.
The trio said they thought they behaved in line with that principle when organizing Google employees against controversial projects, such as working for US Customs and Border Protection. States under the Trump administration. Worker circulate a petition called on Google to publicly commit not to work with CBP.
Google Fired three workers, along with a fourth, Lawrence Berland, in November 2019 for “a clear and repeated violation” of the company’s data privacy policies. The four denied they accessed and leaked classified documents as part of their operations.
In a lawsuit filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court on Monday, Rivers, Waldman and Duke argued that they should receive punitive damages because the company allegedly retaliated against them when they tried to attracted the attention of Google “doing evil,” the lawsuit states.
It can be an uphill battle to convince the jury of exactly what constitutes “evil”. But the plaintiff’s attorney, Laurie Burgess, says it’s not outside of what the courts often have to decide.
“There are all sorts of contract clauses that the jury is required to interpret: ‘don’t be evil’ is not unenforceable,” she said. “Since Google’s contract tells employees they can be fired for not adhering to the ‘don’t be evil’ motto, it has to make sense.”
Google did not immediately return a request for comment.
The principle of “Do not do evil” was often adopted by Paul Buchheit and Amit Patel, the two original employees. The phrase was written on every whiteboard at the company during its early years, according to the 2009 book Google Planet by Randall Stross.
“It has become a single Google value that is well known to the public,” Stross writes, “although it is formally expressed at Google less profoundly as ‘You can make money without doing evil,’” Stross writes. “.
In 2018, there are proposal report that Google has removed “Don’t be evil” from its code of conduct. But one updated version, dated September 2020, shows the phrase still. It is unclear when this motto was reintroduced.
The National Labor Relations Board is investigating the layoffs of Google workers. Administrative Council written in May that Google “is alleged to have violated federal employment law by” unlawfully firing “Rivers, Duke, and Waldman. The NLRB issue is pending final.
Meanwhile, software engineers argue that Google should be punished for not following its own code of ethics.
“Google recognizes that ‘don’t be evil’ both costs money and motivates workers to work within the organization,” the former Google employee said in a statement Monday. “Instead of acknowledging that their stance had changed and jeopardized the benefits that came with the company’s image, Google fired employees who lived up to this motto.”
Editor’s note: Google is one of NPR’s financial backers.
