OPINION: When Google was using the “Don’t Be evil” slogan most users trusted the platform to some extent. At a later stage, Google changed and this forced it to change its slogan, writes Wesley Diphoko.
Google’s unofficial motto was once known simply as “don’t be evil”.
When Google was reorganised under a new parent company, Alphabet, in 2015, the tech giant assumed a slightly adjusted version of the motto, “do the right thing”.
When Google came up with the motto it was unclear why there was a need for a tech company to focus on ethics and morality around its branding.
It has now become clear why that was necessary.
Tech was once an innocent entity and player in society. Tech is responsible for some of the worst harms that are facing modern society.
The sad reality is that it’s difficult to distinguish between good and bad tech. Is it therefore necessary to develop a warning label for bad tech?
An answer to the question requires an understanding of how deep we are in the bad-tech hole.
It is possible to use an app or website that enables bad actors to have access to your personal financial information, location, activities and any other thing you would like to keep private.
Bad actors come in all shapes and forms.
Sometimes you get outright criminals who will never reveal who they are. Sometimes you can deal with a bad actor who is known but not branded as evil due to how their public image is managed.
A more nuanced scenario of a bad actor are regions from which some tech is developed. In the tech world, there’s a debate about US tech and Chinese tech and its impact on society.
The debate ranges from network infrastructure to information platforms such as Tik Tok and YouTube. One region (US) labels tech from the other region (China) while the region (US) that labels others as bad is also producing bad, bad tech.
In cases like these, it's difficult for consumers and ordinary people to make the best choice as neutral information is lacking.
There is no neutral body and an unbiased indicator to warn about bad tech, and it’s desperately needed.
Reports about tech’s bad behaviour are no longer sufficient to warn society. There’s a need for a clear indicator of the bad actors in tech.
Some tech companies have been committing bad acts and they are considered innovators who are solving the world's problems. The truth is that in tech, some innovators are adding to society's problems with their tech.
The problems can range from something as simple as tech effects on human interactions to misinformation and surveillance of its users.
All these effects need to be factored when users (consumers, enterprises and governments) make decisions about the technology they will use. At a surface level, however, it is not always easy for some consumers to make an informed decision as the facts are not always clear.
For this reason, the tech industry needs a neutral body and indicator to assist consumers across the board with the process of choosing tech that will not harm them.
Such an indicator can take various forms, among them a rating that can be clearly visible for consumers when they buy hardware and clear warnings for software type of technologies.
As for enterprises and governments, an unbiased rating of technologies can assist them in choosing technologies that are not harming society in one way or another.
Warning labels have been used for tobacco and alcohol products.
At some point, Prince Harry criticised social media as being "more addictive than alcohol and drugs".
As matters stand, some technologies, such as social media, have been instrumental in harming people in many ways. Some social media companies have tried to label what they consider to be fake content. The approach has shortcomings.
A study co-authored by an MIT professor, based on multiple experiments with news consumers, indicated that tagging some stories as false made readers more willing to believe other stories and share them with friends, even if the additional, untagged stories also turned out to be false.
For that reason, it might be better to assign a label to a social media platform to clearly indicate the possible effects of using a specific social media platform.
When Google was using the “Don’t Be evil” slogan most users trusted the platform to some extent. At a later stage, Google changed and that forced it to change its slogan. Is it time Google starts adopting the “Don’t Be evil” slogan again and gets other tech companies to follow suit?
* Wesley Diphoko is the editor-in-chief of Fast Company (SA) magazine. You can follow him on Twitter via @WesleyDiphoko
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