So are you as critical with every other company that does business in China. Are you gonna throw out half of the products in your house which are Made In China? Are you also criticizing Apple and Tesla for doing business in China?

It isn't just about doing business in China, but the nature of the business (and propping up the Chinese regime).

Apple have had plenty of stick about their practices too. I think they just have too many diehard followers that the negative information gets drowned out by the positive.

I think there's a perception that Google is the one company that many people are (or were) supportive of, because of their past stance with regard to China. Google's former motto of "Don't be evil" convinced a lot of people that they have strong ethical standards. This may have been true in the early days. To me, it has not been true ever since Schmidt became CEO. I've been actively avoiding Google as much as possible since around 2005, because it was glaringly obvious even then that they were out to destroy privacy.

I also avoid Apple. Never liked their software, and they have pretty much the same problems wrt privacy.

"The problem, with companies (and with mafia, etc) starts once you take the money."

So true!

The problem is then compounded by stock options.

A couple of months ago there was a post on the frontpage about some Google service being redesign. All the top comments about it found some non-obvious negative spin on it. That was the time when it became obvious to me how strong the anti-Google sentiment had become at HN.

Look no further than this page. The top comment compares the Chinese Government's surveillance with being forced to sign into Chrome. There would have been a lot more interesting intellectual discussions to be had about this topic: China, corporate responsibility, are the Chinese better off with just Baidu...

It is just a reflection of the accumulated negative sentiment. If you categorize the users, on one end, you'd have a group that would complain about the redesign (but not care about world hunger as a problem, because it doesn't affect them), and on the other the egalitarian crowd that would react to Google's motives more than Google's moves (in China or elsewhere). Lately, it looks like Google is actively trying to alienate anything inside the user spectrum in search for profits.

Unfortunately we can't reach an engaging intellectual discussion on this. In the same way we can't about North Korea dedication about giving up the nukes, or women being able to drive in Saudi Arabia, because people are starving in family prisons and are being hanged and skinned alive, in 2018.

Sometimes the overall picture obscures the interesting intricate details, and as humans are emotional souls, in a very survivalist fashion, they react to what threatens them the most.