The most used search engine in the world, Google, is in court for illegal wiretapping.The ethics, or rather, lack of ethics surrounding this event is evident, violating our rights by infringing on federal wiretapping laws. The claim that a ‘rogue engineer’ was to blame did not succeed in shifting the blame completely onto another, it is believed that the fines given to Google ‘in theory, would be large enough that even Google would notice,’ hopefully showing them that they cannot continue doing this. This event will seriously damage their reputation, despite the fact that it was done by a ‘rogue engineer,’ because we still do not know what Google or the rogue agent were planning to do with all the information they gathered or if Google is still in possession of it. Knowing this people might think twice in investing in them.
The fact that this happened to a well known and highly regarded company known for their employee satisfaction is to bad, but in business this is something that happens and needs to be dealt with.
Google has handled this situation well and has done what they could, but in the end a company needs to pay the price for unethical behavior.