Should Google Always Tell the Truth?

[Commentary] What is Google’s responsibility to its searchers? In a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Ashkan Soltani, the Federal Trade Commission’s chief technologist, offered a hypothetical that captured why that question is so difficult to answer. “Suppose Google is a fiduciary to us, they and Bing decide that they're going to look out for us. And I happen to believe that vaccines are probably bad,” he began. “And I Google ‘should I vaccinate my child?’”

“If Google is ‘looking out for me,’” he continued, “should they interpret that in the best way as, you've got to shake this person by the lapels, the way that I presume a doctor would?” Or should a benevolent Google’s approach be, “We're looking out for you, we know what kinds of articles you're looking for, let us speed you to your destination?" Generally, he said, he has no ready answer. “But I think the reason we turn to experts, why they have power over us and why we want them to be fiduciaries, is to get the benefits of that expertise,” he added. “In that instance, we’d probably want to be told that the best state of medicine now is that you probably want to have that vaccine.”