The Ethics of Google

One of the units in the Strategic Management class I teach these days covers intelligence gathering, and specifically the need to use all of the people who work for you to gain and process information about customers, vendors, competitors, and environmental factors that might possibly impact the company. Information has always been the limiting factor on strategy development, and forward planning in general, and in the Internet age just about anyone who works for you could run across some critical piece of information on any given day – without even knowing what they’ve discovered. To illustrate the idea, I gave them the example of using Google to research your teachers before starting a class – and how, if they had Googled me they would have found this blog and all of the information it contains about my political, social, economic and personal biases. A good essayist could use that information to tweak a paper to hit my buttons, and even without that application, it would still help you to decide how much reliance to place on my lessons. But while everyone in the class seemed to be able to grasp the idea of gathering this sort of intelligence, a number of ethical issues came up in the same conversation, and I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look…

First, there’s the issue of whether using such information to get on someone’s good side is ethically correct. Granted that there’s not much point in sucking up to a graduate student instructor like me, but suppose it’s your boss – or the CEO who will determine if you’re going to have a long and lucrative career or go back to the farm. It’s hard to imagine how using publicly-available information to conform to his or her ideals of what an employee should be like would be illegal or immoral in absolute terms, but it’s still ingratiating behavior, and inherently dishonest, at least in potential. A more extreme example would be using someone’s online writings (blogs, fanfics, self-published poetry, or whatever) to profile them, and then using your profile of their psychology to manipulate them. It’s certainly possible, using modern search resources, but is it ethical?

Alternately, there’s the possibility of using these new resources to dig up dirt on someone. Examples like the teacher who used to be an “adult film star” are going to be relatively rare, but the old dodge of finding something that the CEO will hate about your rival (or even your boss!) and making sure that information gets loose around the company pre-dates the invention of the Internet by generations. This is also deep into an ethical grey area. On the one hand, you’d certainly want to know if your new company Controller did time for embezzlement, and it could be argued that you have a fiduciary responsibility to the company to make sure higher management knows about this, too. On the other hand, these same resources can be miss-used to tell your boss about a co-worker who attended a rival college, voted for the wrong party, or did something else to which your boss will take an unjustified but virulent dislike…

There was a time when gathering this sort of information would take months of pre-planning, days in the library, huge bribes, and occasionally the employment of private detectives; today the mad geniuses at Google can make all of this information available to you in a couple of keystrokes. The power that would once have been limited to a handful of rich and powerful individuals is now available to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection, and most people aren’t ready for that. The world has evolved, but our ethical structure hasn’t caught up with it yet. In many ways, the misuse of informational resources is just the flip side of the “cyberbullying” cases we’re starting to hear more and more about – and as we move further into the digital age, new social customs and corresponding laws are going to evolve. But until that happens, individuals with Internet access and search abilities will have a huge advantage over everyone who does not. So I have to ask you: is it ethical to use that power to gain a competitive advantage over your rivals in a business context?

It’s worth thinking about…