While you're certainly right about Google having crossed the line, I'd still say that the line should, to really "not be evil", be drawn at the "doing business in" stage. Doing business in a repressive country means having to abide by its repressive laws, which will, sooner or later (and especially in the case of an Internet search engine), involve a conflict between not being evil and not being illegal.

Complicity with tyranny is as evil as active collaboration.

Besides, a company with Google's resources ought to be able to easily put serious weight behind strong anonymity and privacy technologies, and usher in a global revolution of free expression.

That they aren't doing anything in this direction at all, while exposing their users to serious privacy risks through their policy of logging all user queries forever, pretty much proves that the "don't be evil" motto is simply an empty public relations gimmick, and not really a guiding principle at Google.

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