The Google Guys Read Free Page A

non-geeks. Almost everybody who knows them well works for them. Says Robert Davis, the former CEO of onetime search company Lycos, “I’ve never met them. Can you imagine that? They’re about the only people in this industry that I haven’t met.”
    Larry and Sergey are Google. Aside from their recent marriages, Google is their life. But even in marriage they didn’t stray far from Google. Larry married Lucy Southworth, a biomedical informatics doctoral student at Stanford who has done medical work in South Africa and “wants to better the world.” (They tied the knot in December 2007 at Richard Branson’s estate on Necker Island in the Caribbean.) Sergey married Anne Wojcicki, a biotech analyst whose company, 23andMe, Google has invested in. (Their May 2007 ceremony was conducted on a sandbar in the Bahamas to which guests either had to swim or take a boat to reach.) 2 Anne’s sister, Susan, is a Google executive and the person who rented out her garage to Larry and Sergey to help them get started.
    Google’s stinginess with information has become a running joke among journalists. When the San Francisco Chronicle informed Google it was going to report on Sergey’s marriage before the fact, spokespeople warned the paper’s executive vice president, Phil Bronstein, that it would damage the paper’s relationship with the company. His response was “What relationship?”

Google Sometimes Looks Evil
    The problem is that a secretive company looks like a company with something to hide. The intrinsic mystery surrounding Google, and the founders in particular, is a huge problem, probably the biggest for a company that relies heavily on the trust of the people who use its products. Google must be trusted to protect the astounding amount of data it collects about people who use its services—from hackers, from spammers, and from government spies. Many people wonder if Google isn’t evil after all.
    Google does not fit the profile of other companies we might consider evil. It has not been involved in any stock scandals. None of its executives has been forced to do the perp walk in front of TV cameras. It has not been accused of back-dating stock options. It has never been accused of fudging its financial statements.
    Increasingly, Larry and Sergey find that their ideals, their dedication to the free dissemination of any information they can get their computers on, is landing them in court. Seven years ago, Google had one lawyer on staff. Now it has more than a hundred. At a shareholder meeting a few years ago, one stock owner stood at the microphone and asked, “What are you being sued for these days?” David Drummond, Google’s head attorney, responded, “How much time do you have?”
    The question that seems to be on most people’s minds these days is whether Google is becoming an evil corporation. Certainly competitors, copyright holders, and others think so, because Google is infringing on their revenue base. Privacy advocates think so, simply by virtue of the fact that Google holds an incredible amount of data about individuals.
    In the end, it’s tough for anyone to trust a company so big, so powerful, and in control of so much personal data about nearly everyone. One accidental security breach resulting in hackers’ obtaining personal data from Google’s archives—the most likely scenario of breaching the public’s trust—would be devastating to Google’s reputation. The question of whether Larry and Sergey can be trusted with all that data can never really be answered in the affirmative. But one mistake can answer it in the negative forevermore.
    Larry and Sergey are in the position of Gary Hart, would-be presidential candidate in the 1980s who brazenly challenged reporters to find any scandals about him. The press promptly complied by catching him in an extramarital affair, thus ending his presidential