What we mean by wrongdoing
Amazon admitted no wrongdoing, and paid two and a half billion dollars. Both of those things are true, and only one of them was written by a defence lawyer.
A settlement is not an admission. Companies pay to make a case stop, and the agreement almost always states that nothing was conceded. That clause exists to limit what the next plaintiff can use. It is not a finding of innocence, and it is not the standard this site uses.
On this site, wrongdoing means any of the following — conceded or not
- Causing harm to customers, workers, or the public, where the company knew or should have known.
- Breaking the law — and behaving unethically in the places the law happens to allow it.
- Deception: misleading claims, misleading labels, misleading interfaces, terms changed quietly.
- Cover-ups: withholding, destroying or mislabelling documents; burying internal findings.
- Lying — to regulators, to courts, to reporters, to their own staff.
- Refusing to answer: stonewalling, "no comment," settlements whose real product is a gag clause.
- Hiding behind laws they lobbied to get written, and behind the ones they lobbied to keep unwritten.
- Shifting their costs onto someone else: the public, the environment, or your afternoon.
We keep the legal distinction intact. Where a court made a finding, we say a court made a finding. Where a company disputes something, we say so and we link to what they said. Where nothing was admitted, we write that too — you just read it above.
What we do not accept is that the first category is the only one that counts.