Is Google ethical?
Our research highlights multiple ethical issues with Google, including personal digital privacy concerns, providing services to the Israeli military, increasing carbon emissions, and accusations that it is avoiding tax in poorer countries.
Below we outline some of these issues. To see the full detailed stories, and the overall ethical rating for Google, please sign in or subscribe.
Google and digital privacy
Google scored very badly for digital privacy.
Ethical Consumer looks at general digital privacy policies, as well as specific policies for different tools and platforms.
Google LLC explicitly used user data for targeted or behavioural advertising and marketing, and used user data to train or improve AI systems. These are considered problematic because they involves using personal data to tailor content, ads, or marketing to individual users, contributing to profiling and influencing what users see and engage with.
Google also offers multiple different services accessed via a single user account, which can be a privacy risk. Google can combine data from searches, documents, YouTube views, location, payments, advertising, and more into a single profile.
Google stated that it stored records of user conversations from Gemini Apps (like the prompts that you submit or speak). This was considered a privacy issue because stored conversations may contain sensitive information and increase the risk of access, retention, or misuse.
With masses of personal information Google creates detailed characteristics about us to create individual profiles and predict our interests and behaviour. It monetises this information by selling targeted advertising space to advertisers based on these profiles. Google's largest revenue stream is from advertising on Google’s search engine.
According to a BBC article, "Privacy campaigners have called Google's new rules on tracking people online 'a blatant disregard for user privacy'."
Google's politics and finances
Google has room for improvement when it comes to its internal financial ethics.
The highest paid director, Chief Operating Officer Anat Ashkenazi, was paid $49,978,135 (approximately £38m) in total compensation in 2024. Ethical Consumer considers this to be excessive.
Meanwhile, Google’s tax conduct scored poorly in Ethical Consumer’s ratings system. Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. is registered in Delaware, which is considered a tax haven, while the company itself is headquartered in California. The company has multiple subsidiaries, listed as holding companies or investment services, registered in tax havens such as the Republic of Ireland and Singapore. All of these activities raise warning flags around Google’s tax conduct.
Google also is a member of nine lobby groups on Ethical Consumer’s Lobby Group Members list, including Bilderberg Group, World Economic Forum and AmCham EU, all of which lobby for changes that could prioritise business above environment and human rights.
Google and connections with the Israeli military
Google LLC, and its parent Alphabet Inc., have been involved in the Israeli military through their business activities in the country, such as contracts to supply technology to the Israeli government, and by acquisition and investment.
The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) National Committee named Google LLC as a campaign target because it delivered the $1.22bn Project Nimbus alongside Amazon. Awarded in 2021, the contract provides cloud computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence and other technology services to the Israeli government and the Israeli military.
According to the BDS movement, “Nimbus offers the platform for the Israeli military to run deadly AI programs such as Lavender and Gospel – crucial to the Gaza genocide.”
In 2025, The Guardian stated that the Nimbus contract included a mechanism to track payment data and send information and alerts to the Israeli government about financial transactions. The article stated: “[The Israeli government] feared Google or Amazon might bow to employee or shareholder pressure and withdraw Israel’s access to its products and services if linked to human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories.”
Google has several subsidiaries in Israel. Research by Tech for Palestine found that Google bought nine Israeli tech companies between 2010 and 2025, focussing on businesses that offered cloud storage services and cybersecurity. Tech for Palestine claimed that the company deliberately sought to integrate itself in the Israeli start-up and military tech sector.
Google’s US military contracts
Google LLC supplies the US military.
Open data source website usaspending.gov listed 17 contracts between the US Department of Defense and Google Public Sector LLC, a subsidiary of Google LLC.
The largest contract was awarded for “joint warfighting cloud capability program management”, totalling $13,216,056.00, between 2022 and 2026, and potentially 2027.
Read more about Google and other tech companies' involvement with militaries.
Google and workers’ rights
Google also performs poorly when it comes to workers’ rights.
While it has a supplier code of conduct, outlining minimum expectations for workers, such as no use of forced or child labour, the policy does not require payment of a living wage or contain adequate limitations on working hours.
In 2021, The Guardian reported that Google had been “illegally underpaying thousands of temporary workers in dozens of countries and delayed correcting the pay rates for more than two years as it attempted to cover up the problem”. After The Guardian contacted Google, the company admitted the failures and said it would conduct an investigation.
Google and climate change
Google scores very badly in Ethical Consumer’s climate rating.
The company discussed measures it had taken to cut emissions, such as increasing its renewable energy use and data centre efficiency, encouraging suppliers to reduce emissions, and using more recycled content for consumer devices.
However, the media and NGOs have repeatedly criticised Google for climate harms. In July 2024, The Guardian reported: “Google’s goal of reducing its climate footprint is in jeopardy as it relies on more and more energy-hungry data centres to power its new artificial intelligence products. The tech giant revealed […] that its greenhouse gas emissions have climbed 48% over the past five years.”
The tech company told The Guardian that its “extremely ambitious” goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2030 “won’t be easy”. It said “significant uncertainty” around reaching the target included “the uncertainty around the future environmental impact of AI, which is complex and difficult to predict”.
In May 2023, Climate Action Against Disinformation, a coalition of civil society groups, published a report called YouTube’s Climate Denial Dollars. The report stated: “Google [the owner of YouTube] has failed to systematically enforce its policy to demonetize YouTube videos that contain climate disinformation.” It also criticised the company for possessing a weak definition of climate misinformation, that “exempts popular and prevalent misleading content that’s garnered millions of views”.
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The text above was written in May 2026, and most research was conducted in April 2026.