BY Matt Marrone DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Thursday, March 19th 2009, 1:05 PM
Is Google evil?
In 2001, just a few years after Sergey Brin and Larry Page formed Google out of a garage, company brass adopted the phrase "Don't Be Evil" as a corporate motto and philosophy. And why not? Their search product revolutionized the Internet and their ad platform broke up the agency stranglehold to help empower the little guy.
Things got murky, though. Google began raising ethical concerns with various projects including mapping the entire planet, archiving classic works of literature and storing newspaper articles. With a project aimed at photographing every street in America and beyond, a feature that tracks the physical location of its users, an e-mail service that searches for keywords in written correspondence - and now with a new online service that records and transcribes voicemail - Google has raised eyebrows among privacy advocates.
Google has built a multi-billion dollar empire, with thousands of employees and a stock price envied around the world - but with great power comes great responsibility, and some fear the Mountain View, Calif.-based company could slowly be turning into a 21st century Big Brother.
Could Google, in fact, be evil?
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