According to NPR, three former Google employees claim that the company has a contractual obligation to follow its well-known "don't be evil" policy, and they are suing the company for allegedly terminating them for calling out Google's "evil" actions.
Former employees Sophie Waldman, Rebecca Rivers, and Paul Duke, as well as a fourth employee, Laurence Berland, were fired in November 2019 for allegedly violating the company's data security policies, but they claim they did not leak any confidential information. The acting head of the National Labor Relations Board stated earlier this year that Google "arguably violated" US labor laws by firing the three employees, alleging that Google fired the employees in retaliation for their activism.
The group accuses Google of engaging in "evil" and then punishing them for calling the company out on it in a lawsuit filed in the state of California. According to the lawsuit, when Waldman, Rivers, and Duke were hired by Google, they all signed a contract that included a "don't be evil" rule. As a result, when the employees questioned and petitioned against Google's contentious cloud computing contract with the Trump administration's Customs and Border Patrol in 2019, they believed they were acting in accordance with their contracts, citing potential instances of human rights violations at the border.
Since the early 2000s, "don't be evil" has been a part of Google's Code of Conduct. Although Alphabet, Google's parent company, replaced it with "do the right thing" in 2015, the phrase remains in Google's most recent Code of Conduct, which states: "And remember... don't be evil, and if you see something that you think isn't right — speak up!"