I raised a set of ethical and legal questions for Google regarding this human experimentation involving deliberate deception. Of course I did not receive a response.
As a journalist, I then mailed the Google press office on 16 May and put these questions more formally. Although I have published a science column in the Saturday version of the main local newspaper here in the Kingdom of Eswatini for the last five years, over 250 columns, these are not available on the Internet, so it seems Google does not recognise me as a bona fide journalist and refuses to answer my questions. We are so backward here that we still read newspapers, and that seems to disqualify us — unless Google’s press team has a better explanation for refusing to reply to me.
You’ll see at the end that I gave them a week to respond, that was ages ago, and of course not a peep from Google’s press team. So below is the full query I put to Google, take a look at the questions they will not answer from a journalist working in the Third World (South):
I am hereby now putting a formal media inquiry to Google, to acknowledge:
(1) Google is without doubt engaging in human experimentation without any hint of informed consent; in fact, the whole of your experiment is to deceive completely unsuspecting people;
(2) This involves recording telephone calls to unsuspecting subjects: are there not laws in the USA about covertly recording telephone calls? According to Wikipedia:
Telephone recording laws in some U.S. states require only one party to be aware of the recording, while other states require both parties to be aware. Several states require that all parties consent when one party wants to record a telephone conversation. …
States that currently require that all parties consent to the recording include:
* California …
Clearly, the subjects you telephoned could not have been made aware that they were being recorded: did Google follow US wiretapping laws in conducting this experiment? From which state in the USA were these telephone calls made?
(3) The whole point of this exercise was deception. I am a professional scientific editor specialising in statistical texts. I therefore edit many psychology papers. There are several psychology journals that refuse to accept any study that involves any deception; and all journals that do accept such papers require deception to be very clearly flagged, and for subjects to be “debriefed” if necessary after the experiment. You are clearly engaging in deliberate deception without giving the subjects the slightest idea that they are involved in an experiment. There are therefore multiple issues with the way Google conducted this experimentation.
(4) You then broadcast the subjects’ voices for the whole world to hear how cleverly you had deceived them. Were these subjects then “debriefed” as to what had been done to them? Was their permission sought before their voices were used in a major commercial promotion by Google? Was any permission sought from them to use their responses to this experiment for Google’s commercial purposes?
(5) Google gave no indication as to how many other such trials had been carried out. This makes your exercise essentially meaningless, unless you give these numbers and provide examples of where your system maybe did not work so well. How many other such trials were conducted, and what were the results?
(6) By boasting about this experiment, Google seems to be saying, very blatantly to human beings everywhere, that we are regarded as “fair game” on which to conduct further experimentation without any notion of informed consent. Are you conducting further such deception trials, without informing subjects? Are you really unaware of protocols on human experimentation and deception, or is Google simply telling us that it considers itself above any such ethical considerations?
(7) If the latter — i.e., if you are actually aware that there are very serious issues involved with human experimentation, especially involving deception, and are simply choosing to ignore and flout any ethical concerns — then you are guilty of overt crimes against humanity, without question. If you claim to be unaware of such protocols, then you are clearly not fit to conduct research on human beings and your research programmes should be suspended until you have proven that you are cognisant of the most basic ethics of research. Please will you indicate which option is the case.
I await your timely response to these queries. If I do not hear from you within one week from today, i.e. by May 23, I will publish this entire query as stands, and state publicly that Google refuses to respond to legitimate press inquiries about its ethical standards.
