WHY SHOULD YOU BE WORRIED ABOUT IT?
Google tracks your location and behavior in great depth. Using that information, they could build a detailed dossier. They may not have your actual name, but using the data they do have, an interested third party could easily figure out who you are.
The definition of evil in “Don’t be evil” is pretty subjective, but we can probably all agree that actually building blackmail dossiers on hundreds of millions of users is at least a little evil. Google doesn’t look like they’re going to snap and start slaughtering kittens anytime soon, but . . . .
Google is a publicly traded, multibillion-dollar company. If Google were a country, it would be one of the 100 wealthiest nations in the world, playing in the same economic field as Jordan and Costa Rica. Twenty-four billion dollars isn’t money. It’s a gravitational field, an irresistible force that attracts ever more wealth. A publicly traded company of this size either continues to increase shareholder value or withers and dies. And shareholder value isn’t increased by being good. In fact, evil is a proven money-maker.
Many oil companies and cigarette manufacturers didn’t start out evil, either. Most of the people who run them now aren’t evil. Evil is a pretty rare quality in individuals; it’s an emergent property of large organizations motivated by profit. Billions of dollars can serve as an extremely effective blinder to the common good. To avoid doing evil, a corporation must tread very carefully.