A company like Google has the potential to do a great deal of good in the world but it also has the potential to end up doing a fair amount of harm if it’s not kept in check to a certain extent. One example of this can be seen in recent court records that were made public. These records show that Google does not hesitate to cooperate with law enforcement officials, and while that can be seen as a good thing this cooperation involves user data which is something that Google claims to try and protect as much as possible.
Law enforcement officials have been recorded to send Google requests for user data such as searches containing certain keywords and Google has provided this data freely. This means that if you happen to search for the wrong thing at the wrong time, this could very well lead to you being on the radar of the police which is the sort of thing that the vast majority of people out there are not going to be all that happy about at all since they would not want law enforcement looking into them since a lot of the time law enforcement officials are only looking to close a case and will jump on anyone that they could spin a story around and make them seem like they are the perpetrator even when they might actually be innocent.
Police departments in some regions have a long and sordid history of being prejudiced against black people, which means that Google being so casual about giving user data to the police could have negative ramifications for the black community. This is an unacceptable mismanagement of data that belongs to the users and that Google is only allowed to profit from under the assumption that it would keep this data safe.
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