Corporate affairs and culture

Left to right, Eric E. Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page

Google is known for its informal corporate culture, of which its playful variations on its own corporate logo are an indicator. In 2007 and 2008, Fortune Magazine placed Google at the top of its list of the hundred best places to work.Google's corporate philosophy embodies such casual principles as "you can make money without doing evil," "you can be serious without a suit," and "work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun."

Google has been criticized for having salaries below industry standards. For example, some system administrators earn no more than $35,000 per year – considered to be quite low for the Bay Area job market.However, Google's stock performance following its IPO has enabled many early employees to be competitively compensated by participation in the corporation's remarkable equity growth.

After the company's IPO in August 2004, it was reported that founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and CEO Eric Schmidt, requested that their base salary be cut to $1. Subsequent offers by the company to increase their salaries have been turned down, primarily because, "their primary compensation continues to come from returns on their ownership stakes in Google. As significant stockholders, their personal wealth is tied directly to sustained stock price appreciation and performance, which provides direct alignment with stockholder interests."Prior to 2004, Schmidt was making $250,000 per year, and Page and Brin each earned a salary of $150,000.[dubious – discuss]

They have all declined recent offers of bonuses and increases in compensation by Google's board of directors. In a 2007 report of the United States' richest people, Forbes reported that Sergey Brin and Larry Page were tied for #5 with a net worth of $18.5 billion each.

In 2007 and through early 2008, Google has seen the departure of several top executives. Gideon Yu, former chief financial officer of YouTube, a Google unit, joined Facebook along with Benjamin Ling, a high-ranking engineer, who left in October 2007. In March 2008, two senior Google leaders announced their desire to pursue other opportunities. Sheryl Sandburg, ex-VP of global online sales and operations began her position as COO of Facebook while Ash ElDifrawi, former head of brand advertising, left to become CMO of Netshops Inc.

Google's persistent cookie and other information collection practices have led to concerns over user privacy. As of 11 December 2007, Google, like the Microsoft search engine, stores "personal information for 18 months" and by comparison, AOL (Time Warner) "retain[s] search requests for 13 months", and Yahoo! 90 days.

U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton, on July 1, 2008 ordered Google to give YouTube user data / log to Viacom to support its case in a billion-dollar copyright lawsuit against Google. Google and Viacom, however, on July 14, 2008, agreed in compromise to protect YouTube users' personal data in the $1 billion copyright lawsuit. Google agreed it will make user information and Internet protocol addresses from its YouTube subsidiary anonymous before handing over the data to Viacom. The privacy deal also applied to other litigants including the FA Premier League, the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organisation and the Scottish Premier League. The deal however did not extend the anonymity to employees, since Viacom would prove that Google staff are aware of uploading of illegal material to the site. The parties therefore will further meet on the matter lest the data be made available to the court.