I can vouch that negative reviews can be hidden, my friend wrote one and he sees "23 reviews" including his own, when he is logged in. Everyone else sees "22 reviews" and his is omitted.
Google's don't-be-evil policy bit the dust as soon as they bought DoubleClick, as far as I'm concerned. Their new policy can be accurately summed up as "be less evil than Microsoft", which has understandably given them a lot of headroom to expand.
Don't be evil is very difficult for a publicly held corporation. Their true mission, despite any noble intentions of their founders, is to increase value to the shareholders.
For me the first, "that sounds kinda evil" moment was the compliance with gov't censorship (and possibly private data sharing) in countries with poor human rights records. As someone stated, MS (and Yahoo) do the same, but it's still kind of sad.
I'm curious, do you think Google should operate in the United States? There are laws that could be used to force Google to say turn over your private data. Would not then the same argument apply?
On the other hand, the value of being able to use Google, despite its marginal risk, seems quite a good "exchange" for many people (that is, the usefulness of say search being weighed off against getting rounded up in say a war on child porn). I think there is a value judgement that is much more nuanced than what you are suggesting.
See, when our (US) government does it ...it's okay. It's just those other evil countries that are wrong when they demand user data from an Internet company.
Yes, there is certainly a value judgement here. This is why I was careful to use the term "poor human rights record". I'm sure there are many that think the US has a poor human rights record, and I know there is always room for improvement, but I'm certainly not afraid to use my Google account here.
For a more quantifiable ranking of countries, see:
This seems like they paid people to write reviews, but I see no suggestion that they instructed paid reviewers to be biased. More content is better for everyone, as far as I can tell.
