Tech Ethics Timeline
Gemini Deep Research project mapping ethical and legal violations at the largest tech companies over time, scored by impact.
Cumulative Impact (58 Scored Incidents, 351 Total Points): Meta (90) and Google (67) account for 45% of all recorded severity points since 2000; switch categories above to inspect the exact incident breakdown.
A Gemini Deep Research run that built a longitudinal view of corporate ethics failures across big tech — antitrust, privacy, labor, safety, content, and AI-specific violations from 2000 through 2024. Each incident was scored by impact (severity × scope × duration × precedent) and plotted on a per-company timeline, with the bubble size scaled to the impact score.
The headline pattern: a small number of companies carry most of the cumulative impact, and the distribution is not what most narratives assume.
Aggregate impact scores (cumulative through 2024):
- Meta / Facebook — 90 (Cambridge Analytica, content moderation failures, repeated FTC actions)
- Google / Alphabet — 67 (antitrust on search and ads, multiple EU rulings, privacy)
- Amazon — 45 (labor practices, antitrust, FTC suit)
- Apple — 42 (App Store antitrust, supply-chain labor, privacy posture vs. practice)
- Tesla — 34 (Autopilot safety, labor/discrimination, securities)
- Microsoft — 33 (concentrated in two eras: early-2000s antitrust, then 2020s AI/cloud)
- OpenAI — 26 (compressed into 2022-2024 — copyright suits, governance crisis, safety departures)
- Netflix — 14 (lowest — content controversies but limited regulatory exposure)
The Meta-vs-rest gap is striking. So is OpenAI’s score for a company that didn’t exist meaningfully until 2022 — it took less than three years to accumulate impact comparable to companies with 20+ year histories.
Embedded below.