~/alphabet $ grep "don't be evil" code-of-conduct.md // no matches in preamble since 2018. it knew.
it's not a search engine · it's a sensor array with a search box
[01] THE MODEL
Roughly four fifths of Alphabet's revenue is advertising. Read the product catalog again with that number in mind. It's a sensor catalog.
Search reads your intentions. Gmail reads your correspondence, and until 2017 it scanned the contents to target ads. Maps reads where you go, Chrome reads where you browse, Android reads everything the phone can sense. Public DNS reads your lookups, Analytics watches you from about half the websites on earth, the speaker hears your kitchen, the thermostat knows when you're home, the watch knows your heart rate. One company, one identity graph, one buyer.
None of this is hidden. It's in the earnings calls. Google's products are free for the same reason the bait in a trap is free: the economics are settled elsewhere. The corporation isn't evil, it's obedient, and it obeys the revenue line. The revenue line says: know more.
The motto did its job for twenty years, then got awkward. In 2018 "don't be evil" was quietly moved out of the code of conduct's opening lines, surviving only as a stray sentence at the end. Nobody announces the moment a slogan becomes a liability. You find out from the diff.
// the array, itemized
| 1998 | founded as a search engine. the search box is still the lure |
| ~78% | of alphabet's 2023 revenue came from ads. the rest is rounding and cloud |
| 2018 | "don't be evil" dropped from the code of conduct preamble, no announcement |
| ~65% | of browsers are chrome. the ad company ships the window you view the web through |
| 3B+ | active android devices. the ad company ships the phone too |
| ~half | of all websites run google analytics. you visit google even when you don't |
// you can avoid the search box. you cannot avoid the array.
[02] THE RECEIPTS
The cars photographing your street were also sniffing wifi traffic, collecting emails and passwords from unencrypted networks in dozens of countries. Google called it a mistake by one engineer. The FCC fined it for obstructing the investigation, then 38 states settled for $7M, about an hour of revenue.
In 2018 the AP showed that turning Location History off didn't stop Google services from recording your location; a second setting kept logging anyway. Forty states settled for $391.5M in 2022, the largest multistate privacy settlement in US history. The switch said off. The database said otherwise.
Chrome kept tracking users in Incognito; a class action surfaced internal emails where employees joked about the spy-guy icon and admitted users misunderstood the mode, because the mode was built to be misunderstood. Settled in 2024: Google agreed to delete billions of records it should never have had.
Google kept location pings in a database called Sensorvault and answered geofence warrants: police drew a circle on a map and got everyone inside it. Not suspects. Everyone. Innocent people became suspects for biking past a burglary. Google only moved location data on-device in 2023, when the headlines outweighed the value.
In 2019 it emerged that Google was receiving health records of tens of millions of Americans through a deal with Ascension hospitals, names and diagnoses included, without patients or doctors being told. Legal under HIPAA's business-associate rules, which tells you about HIPAA, not about Google.
Google spent four years promising to kill third-party cookies in Chrome, shipped FLoC, renamed it Topics, delayed three times, then in 2024 announced the cookies would stay after all. The privacy project died the moment it touched ad revenue. Every privacy project here dies at exactly that altitude.
$ google --delete-my-data > your request has been received and logged. $ google --show-what-you-have > preparing takeout.zip (4.2 GB). this may take a while. // they will happily show you the file. they will even let you download it. // the one thing the file cannot do is stop growing.
[03] THE MOAT
A company whose paying customer is the advertiser cannot make you the customer. There is no setting for that.
This is the structural fact every Google privacy feature orbits. The features are real: encrypted backups, on-device processing, dashboards, auto-delete timers. And every one of them ships exactly as far as the ad model allows and not a millimeter further. Auto-delete defaults arrived after the lawsuits. Location data moved on-device after Sensorvault made the papers. The cookie phase-out died when the replacement couldn't match the revenue. You can chart the boundary of Google's conscience and it traces the income statement.
"We don't sell your data" is the company's favorite sentence because it's true. Selling the data would be stupid; the data is the moat. Google sells access to you, targeted by everything it knows, while the knowing stays in-house where competitors can't touch it. You are not the customer and you are not even the product. You are the mine, and the ore never leaves the property. Facebook runs the same refinery, and the state subpoenas the output: every geofence warrant is a reminder that whatever a corporation collects, a government can eventually read.
// the privacy settings page is real. it's the fence around the mine, painted nicely, owned by the mine.
[04] VERDICT
Degoogle gradually. But start now, because the file grows daily and deletes never.
Nobody quits a fifteen-year Gmail address in an afternoon, and the all-or-nothing framing mostly produces nothing. So go in order of leverage: a browser that isn't made by an ad company, a search engine that isn't a logging endpoint, then mail, then maps, then the phone itself. The replacements work today and the stack page lists mine. The point isn't purity. The point is that privacy is a right you exercise, not a setting you toggle on infrastructure owned by a company structurally unable to grant it, sitting one warrant away from the agencies and the programs that treat its servers as a card catalog.
// they removed "don't be evil" so quietly you had to diff the page to notice. notice.