Comment by jkaplowitz

They are definitely acting in far more ethically concerning ways than they used to, but as for literally ditching the phrase “don’t be evil”, most of the internet conventional wisdom on that is incorrect.

When they reorganized to have Alphabet as a new parent company, Alphabet’s code of conduct said “do the right thing”, but the subsidiary Google that still makes everything we usually discuss as Google kept “don’t be evil” in its code of conduct. At a later point Google did move that sentence out of of the most prominent position in the preamble, but it’s now in the second-most prominent place, right at the end.

But, yes, as I said at the start of this comment, they do a lot more awful or potentially evil things than they used to.

Disclosure: I worked for Google years ago, but I left before all the changes I discuss in this comment and had nothing to do with any of them. I am sad to see Google decline to roughly the level of being at least as ethically good as most of their major competitors, instead of far better as they used to be.