Google Trying to Get Bigger — and More Evil?

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When Google announced a $3.1 billion acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick, European Union officials and internet privacy advocates warned that the massive trove of information Google has on virtually every internet user just got bigger.

Count Mother Jones amongst the concerned parties. In 2006, we ran a feature called “Is Google Evil?” that looked into the myraid different ways Google collects information on you — and the ways it coughs up that information to snooping governments. Should you be concerned? Well, Google’s famous founding duo certainly seems to be:

Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the two former Stanford geeks who founded the company that has become synonymous with Internet searching, and you’ll find more than a million entries each. But amid the inevitable dump of press clippings, corporate bios, and conference appearances, there’s very little about Page’s and Brin’s personal lives; it’s as if the pair had known all along that Google would change the way we acquire information, and had carefully insulated their lives—putting their homes under other people’s names, choosing unlisted numbers, abstaining from posting anything personal on web pages.

Hmmm. Read the feature here.

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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