Greed took over morality at Google: former executive

Ross Lajeunesse, the former global head of international relations at Google.

DHARAMSALA, 3 Jan: A former executive at tech giant Google executive has said that he left the company as they traded their morality for greed to expand and multiply its revenues.

Ross LaJeunesse, an expert in human rights who has worked over a decade as the Global Head of International Relations for Google has made the remarks while disclosing his decision to leave Google in a video posted to Twitter.

LaJeunesse who served as the deputy chief of staff of the California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger before joining Google in 2008 says that he was drawn by the company’s motto and his belief in the power of technology to make the world a better place, to spread democracy, information and human rights all around the world.

“At the time, google’s motto was “Don’t be evil” and I took that very seriously,” he says.

Now running as the Democratic candidate for the US Senate in his native Maine, he says things at google changed.

“Profits started to come before people and principles and it wasn’t long before executives started pushing to get back into China.” 

The former executive says that he “could have done what many company executives have done which is put their heads down and shut up. But because of my main values, I did the opposite. I stood up and I spoke up.”

And when the company tried to buy his silence, he says that was the final straw and he walked out of the door.

“This isn’t just a google story. Corporate greed and corruption have influenced our politics too,” he concluded.

Google first entered the Chinese market in 2006 with the tech giants founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin keen on staying in Chinese market only if the company’s presence is helpful to its users even if there is was censorship of some topics.

Eventually Google withdrew its search engine from China in 2010, due to censorship, hacking and in protest of China’s human rights violations.

Google is now said to be secretly planning a relaunch in China with a censored version of its search engine codenamed ‘Dragonfly’ that drew ire from politicians activists and rights groups as well.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *