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.
When you score big-tech legal and ethical controversies from 2001 through 2024 on a 1–10 severity scale rather than by headline volume, two companies carry nearly half the cumulative weight across the eight firms tracked. I used Gemini to compile 58 documented incidents across privacy, antitrust, labor, safety, misinformation, and corporate ethics, then plotted each event as a severity-scaled bubble on a company timeline.
Aggregate severity scores (cumulative through 2024):
- Meta / Facebook — 90 (Cambridge Analytica, Myanmar violence, Facebook Papers, youth safety)
- Google / Alphabet — 67 (2024 search monopoly ruling, Project Dragonfly, Wi-Spy, privacy and labor)
- Amazon — 45 (warehouse labor conditions, third-party seller data, Ring police partnerships)
- Apple — 42 (Foxconn labor, e-book antitrust, Locationgate, Siri grading, Batterygate)
- Tesla — 34 (Fremont workplace discrimination, Autopilot recall and staged video, “funding secured”)
- Microsoft — 33 (spanning 2001 US antitrust settlement, stack ranking, ICE contract, and Windows Recall)
- OpenAI — 26 (2019 capped-profit pivot, then 23 points in 2023–2024 across Kenyan contractor labor, NDAs, data scraping, and Sky voice)
- Netflix — 14 (lowest — employee walkout, mobile throttling, and pricing controversies, with minimal regulatory exposure)
Meta’s cumulative total sits well ahead of everyone else’s, while OpenAI accumulated 23 of its 26 points in just two years (2023–2024), putting a young lab in the same range as companies with twenty-year histories.
Embedded below.