Most Android phones push you to put everything into the cloud. Do you know why? Oh yeah, that's right, so they can sell your data to advertisers.
Recently, they stopped putting organic search terms in referral traffic from the Google search engine to a website, effectively making it impossible to use any other applications except Google Adsense. Great company, right?
They have had a monopoly as bad and far reaching as Microsoft..yet I rarely hear the hatred that I used to hear about Microsoft in the late 90s.
It seems like all you need to do is support the developer community by giving out lots of free software/open source and the tech community will forgive you for pretty much anything (employing you at $100,000+/year also helps in this forgiveness).
Let's not exaggerate. Google might not be perfect; nobody is, but their actions are great magnitudes in distance from the evil some other companies have done. I'd rather work for Google than any of the companies below:
- http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/10/1141724/-Walmart-fu...
- http://www.alternet.org/story/52526/rural_communities_exploi...
- http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/08/02/3466915/chiquita-c...
- http://philosophia.uncg.edu/phi361-metivier/module-2-why-doe...
- https://www.aclu.org/prisoners-rights/private-prisons
- ...just about any oil company.
- ...The diamond industry.
- ...and I'm highly suspicious of what goes on in insurance & credit card companies.