I may get in trouble for saying this, but here goes.

No good deed goes unpunished I say <sigh>. Google, a company which has been more transparent than most other companies I care to remember (and I've worked for a lot of shitty big companies). A company which gives away more open source than most other companies. A company which hires people based on "Googley" culture, which includes, a culture of employees who actually desire to be open and to act against abusing consumers and often confront management if they try to do so. A company which has stood up for the internet and protested SOPA. (A company I'm proud to work for.)

After all that, people still keep putting up batshit crazy conspiracy theories about what Google plans to do ("dominate the world" and other crazy shit in comments). Did you ever think that maybe, just maybe, Google management, although in the business of generating a return for shareholders, is not in the business of maximizing shareholder returns at the cost of everything else, including abusing their customers, users, and employees? If Google's sole interest was to bend over for profits and shareholders (to go evil because that's what Wall Street demands), they could have cut costs a long time ago to boost EPS, or sold your data to direct marketers.

Or maybe, that tens of thousands of employees, trained into a progressive culture of openness and transparency, won't just sit idly by while some kind of uber conspiracy theory using your data takes place? Even if Larry and Sergey were false prophets, preaching sermons every week at TGIF about Googley-ness, but secretly practicing evil, they still have created an expectation in their employees of being well behaved, and that doesn't fade fast.

Google's been running lots of free services that cost a hell of a lot of money to develop, maintain, and host, from search, to email, to maps, street video, youtube, etc. Not to mention hundreds of open source projects, including big ones like Android and Chrome which are staffed by very large teams. None of this costs anything for the end user, except the ability to model your preferences and target advertising. For Developers, besides open source, Google runs lots of developer conventions, and hands out free hardware costing millions like candy. When you go to Apple developer events, how much does it cost, and how much free stuff do you get?

You may think that is a bad bargain, so then, don't use free web services. But there is nothing inherently evil about modeling users via their behavior. A perfect search engine would know enough about you from your behavior, to predict what your question really meant out of a set of possible ambiguous ones, and that requires a historical relationship with the person asking the question.

Google's privacy policy changes really is about simplifying the legalese as well as having single-sign on for its services, and combining data to allow all of them to better serve the user. We don't want to be like Yahoo, with 500 different properties, none of them integrated very well. We want our stuff to work together more seamlessly. After all, if you are trying to organize the world's information, that means aggregation.

You may cynically think this is bullshit, but us poor naive, deluded, employees actually believe that is what we're working on. So somewhere along the line, we will have to learn the evil truth that we're actually been building a weapon for world domination.

I guess it would be like working on nuclear energy and being told enriching uranium was only for peaceful purposes, and not for bombs. I suppose it's possible.

But do try to remember, this company has a reasonably flat management structure, that it has tens of thousands of people who care a lot about doing the right think because it is part of company culture.

That counts for something, at least, a check and balance.