Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
I run a web crawling company named Datastreamer where we license data to social media monitoring firms.
We're very white hat... Don't even like to mess around with grey hat areas as we don't want something like the Cambridge Analytica situation coming back to bite us in the ass.
About 1.5 years ago we were contacted by a 3rd party firm which we eventually found out was a cut out for Saudi Arabia.
The deal was at least $350k per year but we never got down to final negotiation. They wanted a LOT of data and also custom support and engineering. It could have easily hit $1M which is a lot of money and would have been a significant percentage of our revenue.
About a month into conversations the questions became a bit disturbing. It was clear to me that they were interested in tracking ethic minorities and trying to track down their physical location.
... you can read between the lines in the RFP.
After finding out what happened to Khashoggi I'm VERY happy about my decision.
They were using this technology to harass him on social media and I'm sure are and were tracking other people.
> More to the point, if you’re in Saudi Arabia (or really anywhere), it might be prudent to think about avoiding insecure communication tools like WhatsApp and Viber
- by default they'll upload backups of your messages to Google cloud.
- (more importantly for me) I really don't trust Facebook to:
1.) not abuse metadata
2.) not mess up security somehow
3.) stand up against whatever oppressive regimes we might see in the future
In addition I don't want to make the Facebook ecosystem any stronger if I can avoid it.
A nice bonus is that I strengthen the network effect of other ecosystems when I use them by default.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/17/silicon-valley-hoped-the-k...
Don't let scumbags have their way, if you can tip the scale in the other direction. But again, don't want to take the moral high ground and tell people what to do.
Last I checked, they had people contact them and published material they liked.
Not discounting the work they do, but there's a huge difference between them and someone like The Guardian assigning reporters to investigate a story.
and then they'll shop around some more.
it will cost them, more and more, and hopefully it will be deemed not worth it.
There are two issues at play
1. Not everyone is prepared mentally to turn down big payouts. I have seen this happening up and down the food chain. You only understand how hard this is after you have been in that position. And these day some of the cheques that get waved in your face are insane.
2. People get sucked into a certain kind of "lifestyle" that they get insecure about loosing. And will do whatever it takes to maintain that lifestyle. Once they get "trapped" they are part of this global mega machine of similar folk. Sometimes it feels like watching ants in an anthill. All on autopilot.
The thing is they know they are trapped and convincing them to give it up is not simple.
Nobody is prepared for racial profiling and genocide either.
Let's try this again,
You said you haven't found effective ways to do anything about it.
How about you stop calling them friends for a start.
Secondly, say something. You're literally the only one who can.
Don't just sit there and try to justify their shitty actions so you can let yourself off the hook as if you tried but couldn't do anything because you know, what about their lifestyles.
Ergo, in response to your previous post, one of two things is true. (1) There is no true evil in the world. Or (2) one should be suspicious of elaborate arguments, because they're often coming from people paid to defend profitable evil.
The counterargument to (2) would be "Well, 'good' has PR too." But I think it's objectively demonstrable that evil pays much better.
The US sells more weapons than anyone else - obviously a LOT of people make a living selling them.
This isn't as good an excuse as you think it is.
You might want to ask yourself if there is anything you believe in or care about beyond your own genetic code.
It's one of the reasons suicide bombers blow themselves up too.
But, as in this case he will live and it ignores the lasting psychological damage on those around them - becoming malevolent will affect the people around, and not in a good way.
Not really. By succumbing to this temptation he's contributing to creating a worse future for everyone, including his children and their children.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Button,_Button_(The_Twilight...
And some countries play harder ball than the CIA and SIS
If you're making this sort of software for one country or organisation then you're effectively a weapons trafficker so you might as well sell to all sides and reap in the profits.
It’s a very slippery slope.
And when your kids lost all respect for you after finding out what a shameless sell-out you are, well...
whatever.
some companies/individuals would've jumped on it.
i dont know how engineers sleep at night who write spyware that track and ultimately contribute to people getting tortured to death, usually political dissidents.
also ppl designing new ways to kill humans. wtf is that shit? real contribution to humanity lol
That was a smart but arguable approach, Google was heavily criticized to present those "passively censored" results. However, no one from Google at that time did a #walkout or resign for that. Also notably Google did not quit China for the criticism it received, but for a later government sponsored hack targeting its code and service known as Operation Aurora.
So to compare 8~10 years ago and now, it seems GOOG leadership hasn't change much on what they think they can do (aka "moral compass"); Google employee did become more active on these issues which I think is progressive.
> Brin: I don't think it's a question of taking on China. In fact, I am a great admirer of both China and the Chinese government for the progress they have made. It is really opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent, and that's the key issue from our side.
>SPIEGEL: Four years ago, you allowed your service to be censored. Why have you changed your mind now?
>Brin: The hacking attacks were the straw that broke the camel's back. There were several aspects there: the attack directly on Google, which we believe was an attempt to gain access to Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. But there is also a broader pattern we then discovered of simply the surveillance of human rights activists.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/google-co-found...
One is that the hack made Google realize it was not a good, stable place to do business, and the other reasons were just a good PR side effect. The other is that the hack gave Google occasion to reevaluate, and they realized being involved in that kind of censorship didn't sit right with them.
I suppose it could also be some of both.
It reads to me like: "I really oppose prostitution, but I go to prostitutes anyways"
Because the world is changing. The concern around privacy and censorship hasn't reached that level back in 2006 (Mainly because most westerners hasn't been effected by it, funny).
The situation today is much different now.
BUT, I don't think this will be a easy battle. Many people on Slashdot don't even believe Google will just stop trying after this.
The harm is done, Google.
Because Slashdot is a good source for unbiased opinions :-)
That seems to be the general consensus on /.
Or at least has been for decades.
I'm partial to the complete and utter destruction of robots using overwhelming force. Except obviously for No 6 and the Boomer bots. They're smoke shows.
The thing is, the reason behind those biases is rather logical, that makes those comments worth noting.
(And yes, I know how bad some comments on Slashdot can be :)
And if you are on the wrong side of the current political regime ....
It is not just freedom to read but the protection of you against a totalitarian regime that worry us. Especially if you think it is safe to ask to google.cn
The fact that Pichai refused to say they wouldn't re-enter China shows this is probably just a pause until things die down.
It's a true testament to the power of quality investigative journalism.
> His reveal is what brought it to
> the attention of other Google
> employees
This is like giving credit to Glenn Greenwald instead of Edward Snowden, or Reality Winner, or Chelsea Manning. The real people who take the risks end up in the back, while the reporters end up with all the prestige on the stage.
And it's not like the story has concluded anyway. Google's management still seems inclined to launching in China, they just want the heat to go away right now.
Also, 'going on the record' isn't always an option. In the case of someone like Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning, or Edward Snowden, it would mean life in prison -- or worse if they were in a non-Western democracy.
The unfortunate thing is that the headline of this article should probably be "Google's Secret China Project Now Even More Secret."
Google hasn't pretended to give in to pressure from employees. Project Dragonfly is still being worked on:
> In recent weeks, teams working on Dragonfly have been told to use different datasets for their work. They are no longer gathering search queries from mainland China and are instead now studying “global Chinese” queries that are entered into Google from people living in countries such as the United States and Malaysia
...and Google has made no promises that they won't launch it in the future:
> Pichai stated that “right now” there were no plans to launch the search engine, though refused to rule it out in the future. Google had originally aimed to launch Dragonfly between January and April 2019. Leaks about the plan and the extraordinary backlash that ensued both internally and externally appear to have forced company executives to shelve it at least in the short term...
I think the title overstates the situation. This doesn't seem so much like an end to the project than an internal political squabble. It seems like 265.com was purchased to do exactly what the Google Privacy Team has forbidden. I don't know Google's internal politics, but I'd be surprised if its privacy team has enough power to hobble one of the CEO's priorities enough to actually kill it.
from TFA it was purchased in 2008. the privacy team wasn’t really a powerful thing until 2011, as a result of the ftc consent decree.
The kiss of death was last week, Republicans saying "they'll work with China but they won't work with the military!" The ads write themselves.
The Republicans are much scarier than a loud minority of slacktivist employees.
Exactly. It's the same tactic employed with various authoritarian measures such as the DMCA, TPP, SOPA, etc. Unpalatable to the public is a temporary condition. They overplayed their hand this time, but corporations are slaves to the inexorable demands of "shareholder value", and those who stand to profit will ratchet up the pressure, notch by notch. This will be back in a year, and then a year hence, and by the Nth exposure the public will have been sufficiently desensitized to it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929
http://fortune.com/2017/10/08/eli-attia-lawsuit-google-racke...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-go...
It's a pragmatic response, not Machiavellian.
Times change. Situations evolve. It'd be imprudent for G to say they are never going into China.
Xi could change his mind, he could retire, or maybe there's a gaping loophole of some kind in the firewall.
Or maybe China literally opens up the firewall and does some kind of different filtering of their own.
It'd be simply unwise to draw any long term conclusions from it all.
If I was more eloquent I'd draw some analogy between Scott Beaumont's behavior and China...
Of course if it is 'disregard safety procedures both can kill you just the same'.
That is if any of his engineers had qualms about what they were doing they’d be checked at the door because again it’s all legal according to the law and they had to hit a deadline.
Especially because there’s nothing here that’s technically exceptional other than it runs counter to what we Americans considered ethical.
Glad the PR fallout tipped whatever cost-benefit analysis they did by severely damaging the Google brand. Crazy they didn’t consider it up front.
The fallout feels similar to them the release of the Boston Dynamics video. They don’t want to be associated with “job automating” robots.
They have a pattern there of being forced to bend since at least the "memo-gate" and although they don't like it the math is clear enough to them. If employees are making money net it is rational to replace them if the alternative could make more money. Willful employees are an annoyance with a relative liability to corporate but their productivity gives them cold rational sway that says "just add it to the employee expenses section if you know what is good for you".
It isn't ideal for everyone - indeed it works because they are outliers. If everyone can do flawless brain surgery it no longer demands a premium no matter how difficult it is. It is in some ways more powerful than traditional labor - they organize because they need the company. Companies can decide to leave and out source to cheaper locales in response. Powerful labor has few equivalent alternatives. I say powerful and not scarce because mere obscurity can be subsituited for - powerful less so. If they could have already they would have. The companies need the high end and they know it. Just look at Hollywood movie budgets to the stars - they can ask for such outrageous sums because the alternative is worse in the current climate.
Of course there is a caveat - if they ever become obsolete they will be dropped quickly due to their leveraging. Things can be very fickle especially with advances that can metaphorically turn weaving from an apprentice-journeyman-master trade to a factory job worked by illiterate women and children.
You will find this type of person throughout all companies, including tech. It’s really unfortunate but if these people get results, their horrible behavior is not only tolerated but rewarded.
> Under normal company protocol, analysis of people’s search queries is subject to tight constraints and should be reviewed by the company’s privacy staff, whose job is to safeguard user rights. But the privacy team only found out about the 265.com data access after The Intercept revealed it, and were “really pissed,” according to one Google source.
So, if he says "we will deliberately expose private conversations directly to government agents", that's a product decision.
You are inventing your conclusion from nothing.
You could be just as likely to draw the analogy with the USA.
With enough selective "facts", I can make almost anything look bad.
Do you have specific issues with their reporting? Or do you just want to baselessly cast aspersions on what they are saying?
The number of people protesting is inconsequential as platters can be built to accommodate a near infinite number of heads.
I mean, I'll be the first to admit I have made mistakes in my career, but I can't recall ever making a mistake that got my boss called in to testify before Congress, or that got my company prptested by Amnesty International, or that got hundreds of my colleagues to sign a letter of protest! Managing to do all of those at once is...well, honestly it's sort of impressive, but is raises questions.
If The Intercept is just completely wrong, I'd expect to see a categorical denial; after all it would make Google look a lot better if they can convincingly demonstrate that all of this didn't actually happen. If The Intercept is right, I'd expect to see Beaumont fired; that's what happens when people violate internal rules and cause significant damage to their employer as a result.
Since we've seen neither...I guess the logical assumption is that The Intercept was right about what Beaumont was doing, but he...wasn't rogue? That official Google policy was to subvert official Google policy, and hide things from the internal teams charged with stopping that exact thing? Like...is the CEO really having meetings with the privacy team and telling them to be extra vigilant not to let product teams misuse personal data, and then later that afternoon meeting with Beaumont and telling him to be extra careful not to let the privacy team find out that he's misusing personal data to develop a product?
What a bizarre situation.
That's what you're saying as a CEO when you're letting rogue executives do projects that bypasses company guidelines, deceives other managers and costs boat loads in resources and PR without any sort of consequences. Or, you're totally fine with what he did because it's a silent approval if you're a manager and you let unethical behavior go unpunished. Nobody told Mr. Pichai being in charge was going to be easy.
If it turns out that the trading desk at a bank has been violating internal rules and conspiring to hide their trading activity from the risk management committee, we don't say "oh, this is a cultural issue; the commodities desk just has a different culture than the risk management committee", we normally say "you're fired, security will escort you from the building now".
Clearly this is a different situation! But in what way?
But, we live in a world where I guess the share holders nod their heads at inappropriate times when growth is on the line.
It's all just out of proportion somehow.
"Just stay good all the time" is the kind of logic that tears down exactly the people and institutions that we should be supporting. You can argue that they should be doing a better job. You can argue that they have taken on additional responsibility and should live up to it. You can argue that we would be better off if nobody claimed to be good in the first place. But "just stay good all the time" is a myopic double standard, crab-bucket thinking at its finest.
But so is "innocent" and "guilty," which is why we have laws to define the two.
Google realizes that "good" is subjective. That's why they have QA, privacy teams, security teams, ect. They rely on a consensus of these groups to define what "good" means to Google using a variety of perspectives.
Choosing to ignore literally all of these mechanisms not only means that something isn't "good," but it's also a pretty clear indicator that the people behind it know it's actually bad.
https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
Beyond that, though, the early internet was very progressive and I think a lot of people saw google as a chance to show the world the good things that technology was capable of. I don't think anyone would argue that some curation is a great thing.. no one wants to find dentists in kansas if they live in montreal of course. I would honestly prefer that breitbart and publications of its ilk be filtered out of my results... but where is the line? Up until recently google was scanning people's emails, which seems a bit dystopian.
If only was just a simple web search with some results removed maybe it won't be such a big deal, but consider this:
- Google does this for big money, so they want to sell ads and maybe other services in China
- To make money from ads Google tracks people and collect their data
- By law all this data from China will have to be hosted in China and the government can access it whenever they want, no warrens needed, no way to opose such a request
So Google will track and collect data and hand it over to China to do whatever, I imagine they could do an SQL query to find who searched some "illegal" keywords and send them to work camps or worse.
I think is normal as an employee to tell your bosses that you don't want to work on tools that will be used for harming others and try to convince them to find other contracts since they have already enough money they could maybe be less greedy.
Combine this with their upcoming social credit system, and you can easily see how this is proactively helping build an authoritarian panopticon dystopia.
The first rule of the social credit system: do not disparage the social credit system.
Would you say the same for the victims of the khemr rouge, millions killed by Stalin?
Maybe the yellow stars helped the Jewish people gather for the Sabbath? /S
Basic human rights are not relative.
Why not tell me how you disagree?
the minorities are the ones who will predominantly get the short end of the deal here
Demanding that Google withdraw from this project is not about "what's best for them". It's about what we are okay with. There's nothing stopping China from implementing the same stuff without help from American corporations, and they're not in any way entitled to such help, so withholding it doesn't presume anything.
This changed my opinion. I thought the controversy was unwarranted; after all it's what many people in China wants. It's good that Google doesn't follow through.
Ad companies have already been doing it for years. As entertaining as Black Mirror is, the episode featuring just such a scenario in China of being capable linking real life identities to online and offline activities for the purposes of a dystopic and a just plain shitty world is very possible. In addition, it's incredibly likely what will happen in China with the social credit system will be much worse than anything you'd see in Black Mirror.
Imagine a world where you could curb the enthusiasm of the entire population for democratic activities or activities that run contrary to state directives. Oh, you said something bad about some mundane activity. Your phone used voice recognition technology to pass that up to the state censor bot. The punitive measures taken can then be expected to occur up to and including an obligatory re-education.
"I pledge allegiance to the great firewall of China and the government of China. I will never make disparaging remarks about any state run corporation or agency, in private and especially not in public ever again."
The State panopticon: VOICE RECOGNITION CONFIRMED SAY THREE HAIL CHINAS AND CONTINUE TO INDOCTRINATION CAMP 3 FOR FURTHER RE-EDUCATION ACTIVITIES
It associates every query with a phone number, not sure what it does for desktops, street address maybe.
I think the issue it that it provides API for the government to process this data.
There are reasons. For example, it would be desirable for Google to avoid being complicit in human rights violations.
To a large extent Google's business, like Enron's before it, depends largely on the trust of its users. Once it begins to wobble, head for the hills.
There are also untold numbers of fascinating patents which never see commercial success, duplication of effort, and arguing about who gets the biggest slice of a cake that doesn't exist yet.
It's ineffective, and therefore I don't like it.
Google wants a world they build and they don't really think anything could be better or as good. That is horrifying to me.
This is the state of the art at the moment and would be useful for such things as: 1)Private search over encrypted documents 2)getting your FICO score like equifax without leaking any information 3)finding genetic treatments for conditions you are predisposed to without revealing your private genetic makeup or a pharmaceutical companies patented gene therapy sequence
Typically retrieval of the document would require a TOR like network.
Ill post a link to my work in the near future. Msg me if you're interested.
it leverages Additive and Multiplicative Homomorphic Encryption with Elliptic Curves. I wanted a fuzzy searching algorithm so went with a minhash implementation on document bigram vectors which were then converted to a locality sensitive hash.
Unfortunately, it is an interactive protocol unlike something like zksnark/starks :(
I have written it in Javascript and plan to deploy it as a plugin in Brave Browser. Sundar really disappointed me recently with his rhetoric; he claims googles pursuit for information accessibility but also want to censor and allow authoritarian governments to profile users.
This would also allow location services without revealing your location
[1] Tracking China’s Muslim Gulag: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/muslims-...
[2] China’s Detention Camps for Muslims Turn to Forced Labor: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/world/asia/xinjiang-china...
[3] Woman describes torture, beatings in Chinese detention camp: https://www.apnews.com/61cdf7f5dfc34575aa643523b3c6b3fe
So Yandex doesn't have that much hope outside of Russia. Unless a dramatic breakthrough is made, of course.
http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/sou... https://www.opensurvey.co.kr/blog/trendreport/sns_2018/ http://www.internettrend.co.kr/trendForward.tsp
As far as I know, there's no report which shows Yandex's significance in South Korean search engine market share.
From what I've read, the main opposition is only coming from Americans... oddly enough.
The Chinese are putting people into concentration camps on the basis of their ethnicity or religion, many are dying and their organs are being harvested.
If the Western press weren't so hypocritically afraid of speaking out - this would be a huge global story, it's a really big deal. This is getting into holocaust territory in 2018 for gosh sakes.
And it's definitely more than Americans speaking out.
The history of what did happen is that after Mao the country went from struggling to feed most of it's people to what is likely the 2nd most powerful country on Earth. It went from GDP per capitalism of $1,000 in 1970 to $8,000 in 2010. China singlehandedly halved global poverty in doing so. While some of it's actions are appalling to foreigners, they are tolerated for historical reasons. E.g. distrust of organized religion stems from repeated religious rebellions that killed tens of millions of people, so many Chinese see the suppression of religion as a necessary measure to ensure social order. In that sense many Chinese have the same underlying ethical framework (don't needlessly cause harm, try to better the lives of everyday people, etc.), but the lessons history taught the country means that they pursue these ideals in a different way, and opt to make different tradeoffs when balancing different needs. While I am indeed apalled by some of the CCP's actions, I can empathize to a degree as to why Chinese people would still have a positive view of it overall.
Of course, this is coming from a Westerner summarizing my interactions so it obviously risks putting words in other people's mouths.
And FYI - any otherwise civilized place that was held back by totalitarian communists, or ruined by war was able to 'bounce back'.
All of Europe was in ruin in 1945 - they also grew by 'leaps and bounds' after that time. China just had to wait for Mao to die.
More poignantly - none of this can dismiss much of the abuse - it cannot be written of as 'cultural difference'.
With that history, I think a person can genuinely, earnestly believe that the CCP's policy towards Uhigyrs or Falun Gong is limiting human suffering in the grand scheme of things. This is what I mean when I say that it's possible to have the same underlying values, but people from different societies can come up with drastically different or even conflicting implementations.
This is moral relativism to a degree. But empathy is an exercise in relativism. I don't like what China is doing to it's religious minorities, and I don't want this post to come off as trying to justify it. But if we do want to convince the country to change it's ways I think it's important to see why the country is doing what it is, and not pick an easy conclusion like saying China or the CCP is immoral.
You are justifying, on cultural grounds, the mass incarceration of a minority because 'they could pose a potential social problem, even though they are not presently' which is abhorrent.
Yes a 'cultural context' of Han ethnocentric racism and open bigotry, perhaps, but of course this isn't really justifying anything.
There is no rationalization for arbitrarily incarcerating massive parts of the population, it basically doesn't make any sense at all.
Especially considering the none of the Falun Gong, Tibetans, Uighurs represent any threat to China's peace in the first place.
Every place on Earth has had some degree of calamity or violence in the past, and China has definitely had it's share of mass murder (giving and receiving), there's no shortage of this in their own history books, if anything they should be even more enlightened about it all.
There are no cultural arguments that can be made here, the situation, particularly because of the deaths and subsequent organ harvesting, is approaching 'holocaust' terms.
> they could pose a potential social problem, even though they are not presently
It's because
> This region is exhibiting separatism over religious lines, and our country has an established pattern of religous separatist movements turning into catastrophic wars that claim tens of millions of lives.
In short, while Westerners might see mass incarceration of religous minorities and think, "holy cow, if we don't do something this will be another Holocaust" Chinese might look at Uhigyr separatism and think, "holy cow, if we don't do something this will be another Taiping rebellion". The former occurred more recently, but the latter was several times larger in magnitude. I'm not Chinese myself so I can't speak to the magnitude of the Taiping rebellion in their social memory. But the point is I can at least empathize with their point of view even if I find it's results abhorrent.
And as I have stated repeatedly, do not mistake justifications of Chinese opinions as justifying the actions themselves, and I have repeatedly stated that Chinese treatment of Uhigyrs appalls me. The fact that you accuse me of justifying their actions in spite of explicitly stating otherwise is indicating that you aren't reading my comments with the degree of attention that is necessary to have a productive conversation on a controversial topic like this.
However, there are other sources of information selectively filtered by media. For example,here's a story of a famous Uhigyr celebrity went back to her alma mater (in Chinese):
https://www.backchina.com/news/2018/11/20/594759.html
The Uhigyr celebirties are disproportional more than Han based on their poplulation. But they seems to work/live like nothing happen although the whole world are angry. There are 2 possible reason:s
1. They(all of them) don't care about their compatriot
2. They know the "camps" but they also know the real nature of the "camps".
Most Chinese know these celebrities very well through entertainment news. One even show up on TV almost everyday. If you were a Chinese , which reason would you bet?
3. They are disgusted by the camps, but they know if they speak out they'll end up inside one.
China keeps a tight leash on its celebrities. The government is willing to make even internationally famous ones like Fan Bing Bing disappear for months without explanation. It probably wouldn't take much to make one of the Uhigyr celebrities you mention disappear permanently.
What I said to the other commenter also applies here: don't confuse my empathy with why these camps exist with approval.
Moralizing is an easy to way to stop thinking and settle in a comfortable narrative, a cop-out so one can avoid questioning their own ideological identities. The thirst for a comfortable narrative is so strong today few can resist it, which almost looks like we live in an era when we can no longer afford entertaining different thoughts.
Would I be ok now with now with grabbing every random moron wearing commie t-shirt and throwing him into re-education camp? No. 15 year old me who just finished reading Archipelag Gulag and was finally told my family history during Holodomor? Well I would get a rope, find a tree and get to work.
Things like this are very complicated. Having said that Google is idiotic trying to reenter PRC market. Communist party will never allow them to grow to any degree there if they have any independence, they would need to become a servant of the party 100%, even then.. likely they will just get all of their tech stolen and bunch of intelligence officers placed into leadership roles. There is NO path for them to grow in China and succeed, what they sell is too valuable for control of people to allow foreign controlled entity any growth inside PRC.
What?
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.147...
Tolerant is absolutely not the word I would use.
A few glossy points are made here that rides on a racial or national stereotype.
1. It was Chinese government put people in concentration camp, not Chinese. In the current political atmosphere, I am very cautious to draw this line as a Chinese myself, for the fear of mobbing attacks on Chinese people oversea.
2. many are dying and their organs are being harvested
You need to have reports to support claims of such outrageous behavior. Also it's not clear what is the actual things being done.
Are people dying naturally in the camp, and got organ harvested? Or they were left to die without reasonable medical attentions.
I presume the organ extraction has not got consent from the people, right?
As far as #2, it's splitting hairs. People are put in jail because of their ethnicity or faith, and one way or another, organs are being harvested on mass. Discussions of 'did the prisoners approve of their dismemberment after execution' are just a little insulting really.
It's 2018, this is happening.
It's definitely interesting that Chinese nationals were almost universally for dragonfly and yet the "progressive" activists didn't care at all, preferring to pivot the topic into nationalist rivalry. Ask them in a vacuum and they'd say they treasure diverse perspectives..
Riskier to speak up pro-dragonfly inside Google on an h-1b visa than it is to speak up against dragonfly from outside China IMO.
Human rights are not subject to a simple majority rule.
And this whole thing isn't about what Chinese want. It's about what Americans are okay with helping Chinese do. If the majority of Chinese support labor camps for ethnic minorities, that's one thing; but when American citizens aid them in filling those camps, then those citizens are a fair target for their compatriots, regardless of what the Chinese think about it all.
The US has our own issues, and I'm not comparing or trivializing anything, but you'd be nuts to say that Google should boycott America over them.
If I was American I would be ashamed to comment on human rights abuses.
Precisely because Americans are concerned that the technology as prototyped in the Chinese market might subsequently be applied in a dark-future American market.
It's not farfetched considering the current political climate here.
Google is headquartered in the USA. Not only that, but the engineers working on Dragonfly also reside and work in the USA. As such, not only is it not surprising that the main opposition is coming from Americans, but American citizens have a unique right to express it and have something done about that.
If Google execs want to operate in China without being impeded by the American public opinion, they are welcome to spin off an independent organization for Dragonfly and headquarter it in China, where there are no such pesky obstacles.
Anyway, I will give you one thing: for Chinese it's about to have an obviously better product to use. It has very little to do with morality when they support it. Of course it's not the case for Americans (or any Westerners) as it doesn't directly affect them.
So, if the Chinese people are so concerned about attracting Google, they could maybe understand that they need to change their government into something that respects human rights.
One one had I don't want to be part of this type of behavior but it's just going to give China the opportunity to fund a Google competitor to do it for them...
I think it's lose/lose for Google.
Google is technologically superior to Baidu, and well, basically every company in the world. Less people using VPN = more people exposed. Superior tech = can imprison/murder more innocent people. More companies and governments supporting China with tech + billions = they'll become evermore powerful and continue to do great evil. Google becoming financially dependent on China will give their government more leverage to force Google to share data and add backdoors to their other applications, and they'd be more likely to help build other tools that will help their government build a dystopian surveillance state.
Do I boycutt all Chinese goods? No, but I do avoid everything "Made in China" whenever it's possible (e.g. clothing, DSLR camera, etc.), and I try to discourage other people and companies from doing business with China, as well as protect their online privacy.
- Google search
- Facebook
- YouTube
- Wikipedia (Chinese)
- Twitter
- Netflix
- Instagram
- Tumblr
- WhatsApp
- BBC
- New York Times
- Bloomberg
- Reuters
- WSJ
- TIME
- The Economist
- Amazon
- Ebay
- Yahoo
- LinkedIn
- Bing
- Apple
- MSN
So what compromises are Microsoft prepared to make, but Google isn't?
Might have even considered working for them.
Pichai's words to congress could easily be read to mean "we don't have a release date at this time" not that it wasn't still an active project.
That's how this world works, and it's not like they really have a choice in that matter.
This could be useful in business like suggest what kind of Ad content are "safe" for the Chinese market, automatically.
Also one can harvest blocklist, there can be some very interesting new discoveries, useful intels can be made into updates and alerts.
Google can not disclosure this strategy publicly because the Chinese might masquerade the firewall's behavior accordingly.
Traveling into darkness can be used to fight against darkness. I feel sorry for the engineers.
if this company is still being pulled along (i hesitate to say led) by the CFO, and i believe it is, then this will have lasting repercussions.
the spark of revolution has been quelled and the peasants have been appeased. but their hand has been shown and they have but one card to play. ok sorry for the poor job at evocative rhetoric.
basically, from this point and for the next 5 years the culture will be changed by subtle, barely perceptible nudges. at the end, the engineers will be left without any real voice and any uprising will by met with backlash from their peers, not their betters.
then, google will be able to explore china and similar markets.
or perhaps, much like many tech companies license their IP from an IE subsidiary, the core tech will be licensed to a subsidiary that isn’t constrained by western morals.
It's great that you were born in a western country with a good understanding of freedom and your rights. The majority of the world don't have these conditions. Your "business" decision effects billions of people in the world.
I was born and mostly raised in Iran. "Business" decisions from companies that sold the government DPI equipment made sense for them, their shareholders, and their investors. But at what cost? Iran is a very young country in terms of population age. Many Iranians simply didn't have the opportunity to grow simply because a few companies wanted more $$$ in their pockets.
If you in any way support these decisions while having complete freedom not to, then you're complicit. You're part of the reason so many countries have a lost/dark generation. You're part of the cause of so much suffering in the world.
Good on you Google Engineers who stood against making a few $ of profit to stop the suffering of many, many people.
Since that was 3 years ago, I suspect there's much more advanced network wizardry available today.
The client must trust the DPI cert for it to work.
It comes down to this imo: will the product be used in ways that are morally wrong? Or will it be used in ways which are legally wrong or socially unacceptable?
I agree with you that a company should not sell their products to enable a moral wrong in any country.
However, free speech and oppression of democracy is not a moral wrong. "Free speech" in the west means the Government shouldn't censor speech,this is a relativly new concept almost unheard of in history. It certainly isn't a human right. If a legitimate government of a country censors speech they're merely excercising their authority unless their laws restrict them from doing so as in the west. Whatever your view may be, a corporation does not get to decide social norms and what should be legal in any country.
Of course companies don't have the ability to directly change laws in sovereign countries but they can definitely influence them, just like people in mass can.
Whether or not this will have any effect on China I lean towards absolutely not but at the very least some people at these companies don't want to help them.
For your second point,companies do influence policies but they have no right to force a policy. For example,Google can say "we're pulling out of country X because they don't have this policy" that's arm twisting and in disregard to the sovreignity of the country and its people.
Google isn't irreplacable in China,Alibaba+tencent compete with them heavily anyways.
Freedom of expression is in Article 19 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
i'm not saying you have to agree with it, but this seems like as universally accepted an answer to "what are basic human rights?" as any that might be given (i'm assuming there is actually no universally agreeable definition, but this seems like one of the more respectable and frequently cited sources).
Human rights are not objective truths. The entire concept is something we made up based on beliefs that we formed through the course of history and we formalized the ones that a bunch of us were able to agree upon. They are a figment of our imaginations that we buy into because they're useful tools for structuring a society that isn't absolute chaos. As a result, citing a list that the UN formalized as some sort of factual evidence is, to me, on par with citing religious texts to promote their corresponding belief systems as "correct". That's not to say the list doesn't have value, only that it's open to debate and represents beliefs rather than facts.
I would wager that most people have never bothered to ask the question because morality is useful either way. Even if your claim is true, most people also believed common myths like the earth being flat at one point, so that’s hardly a compelling argument.
I’m not saying morality has no place, only that it’s not a physical reality and you can’t point to a list as definitive proof of what is and is not moral.
You're right. But if it's a question of evidence, I can certainly provide it.
The fact that most people in the world adhere to one of the major religions [1] [2], which have moral duties, a fortiori implies that your view isn't the most common. Even this is vastly under-counting, of course, since it excludes humanists and non-humanists who adhere to secular ethics. I think the uncommonness of your view is quite clear and it would be disingenuous to deny that.
Second, your view isn't the most common even among professional philosophers whose raison d'etre is precisely to ask and analyze these questions. Specifically, your view is the most common neither among those who study meta-ethics nor among the general population [3].
> Even if your claim is true, most people also believed common myths like the earth being flat at one point, so that’s hardly a compelling argument.
I didn't say its uncommonness makes it untrue. I said it's neither the most common (which may or may not warrant a higher burden of proof) nor the most plausible.
[1] http://www.pewforum.org/2017/04/05/the-changing-global-relig...
[2] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
On a separate note, I take issue with the suggestion that an individual identifying with a major religion qualifies as adherence to its principles. This is nitpicking and doesn't impact the larger point you're making, but I think it's an important distinction in general.
I agree that this an important distinction, but a person identifying with a major religion is a strong prima facie reason for thinking they're moral realists. Keep in mind that believing there are some moral facts is a much, much weaker position than believing all or even most moral claims of their religion are true.
> What's the case for moral realism that makes it so compelling?
My personal favorite are Moorean arguments of the form:
(1) Torturing people for fun is morally wrong.
(2) If there's at least one moral fact, then moral realism is true.
(3) Therefore, moral realism is true.
You can replace (1) with your favorite moral fact, such as
(1) The Nanjing massacre [1] was morally wrong.
(1) The torture and murder of Kelly Anne Bates [2] was morally wrong.
(1) The torture and murder of Unit 731 victims [3] was morally wrong.
and have the argument go through. The key point is that, as far as I know, there's no argument against moral realism whose premises are all more plausible than (1).
Another class of arguments are so-called partners in crime arguments [4][5][6], which link moral reasoning with prudential and epistemic reasoning.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre#Massacre
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kelly_Anne_Bates#Mur...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731#Activities
[4] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/000484008026364...
[5] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00048402.2016.1...
[6] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00048402.2017.1...
[1] https://philpapers.org/rec/HUEPCA
I view them as an un-elected advisory group.
I posit that breaking the very morals you believe in yourself, and lying about it, is immoral.
If you say freedom of expression is a human right,then how come no soldier or prisoner is afforded that right? Did they forfeit their humanity? If so,by what authority did they forfeit their own humanity?
Human right as in rights you have for being a human,not a membet of a specific nation or group but rights you are born with. UN defines human rights based on what member states agree is a human right based on voting and electiond. Universally means by nearly every sane and rational human,not by a simple majority.
Good example: most people agree rape is wrong because it's a terrible thing to happen to person and it isn't acceptable. However,the right to not get raped is not a right you have simply for being a human but rather socieities agrees it shouldn't happen to anyone. You'd find marital rape is unprosecutable in some countries and perfectly legal in the west even in the last few centuries. I.E.: people decided it wad bad.
Otoh: a person can eat(if they find food),sleep,and be alive because they're human.
True, but they do get to decide whether or not it's acceptable to do business in a country.
I think that's a bit of a naive stretch.
Where the objection is moral,if your moral worldview has an a moral authority suoerseding a nation state,that moral authority must be obeyed (for example,I have my God as an absolute moral authority with absolute authority over all things)
i and many others disagree with this statement.
> "Free speech" in the west means the Government shouldn't censor speech,this is a relativly new concept almost unheard of in history. It certainly isn't a human right. If a legitimate government of a country censors speech they're merely excercising their authority unless their laws restrict them from doing so as in the west. Whatever your view may be, a corporation does not get to decide social norms and what should be legal in any country.
why should the sovereignty of a national government supersede the inalienable rights of an individual? what makes a particular government "legitimate"?
if a totalitarian government decided that ethnic cleansing against a minority population was the correct course of action for itself, and if it carried that out entirely within its borders, would you consider that to not be a moral wrong, because the nation was exercising its own sovereign power? i'm just trying to figure out how much sovereign government power justifies in your moral framework.
Sovreignity means even if others disagree with what a country is doing or with the way things are in a country,they have no authority to do anything about it by force. An individual may have their most basic rights violated, however everyone outside of that country lacks authority to help them. That's why countries keep militaries,to protect their sovreignity,not just borders and people. Sovreignity means they have the right to self-determination,the right to decide what they think is legal and what rights people can have and the people get to fight for what form of government they should have and how these rights and laws will be written and executed.
Yes,ethnic cleasing is very wrong,however other countries lack the authority to interfere. They can however ooenly welcome and protect refugees and take diplomatic action that affect that government's relations with other governments.
Either you're in or you're out.
We fight for the other people right to speak even if we disagree so one day we are all free. And when idea’s time has come ... let us start earlier
Who does? How were those people chosen?
That is not the question at hand. If China or Iran want to implement censorship, Google can't stop them.
The question is whether Google should help them. And since Google is not a Chinese or an Iranian corporation, but rather an American one, USA as a sovereign country - and, since it's a democratic republic, its citizens - absolutely gets to decide what's acceptable on its soil, for its citizens, and for its corporations.
If you're saying it's citizens get to decide morality,then which citizens? Is morality a matter of popularity? For example some might consider Google' core business practices thar involve stalking users immoral. On a different note most adults consider adultery and greed immoral but neither is illegal and you don't see people quitting companies because the company is too greedy.
The citizens get to decide both for themselves. Then they translate that to public policy in various ways - by voting for people who they expect to pass laws on what they consider illegal, and by e.g. boycotting companies that do what they consider immoral.
I suggest you read the previous Dragonfly threads, they were filled with Chinese users proclaiming that they hated paying for VPN just to use Google. I'm not saying everyone would stop using VPN, but a significant percentage would.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...
The workers at Google who protested despite the loss in value of their equity should be commended.
No one is loyal to Google. Apple fanboys have a double standard that I don't understand, maybe its a social club.
1. the ones expressing dissent were caught in internal Apple network and subsequently quietly laid off for whatever official reason, preemptively
2. reporting such news could cost a reporter highly in the future; surely getting no access to latest Apple stuff but other SV companies are watching as well
3. "can do no wrong" culture
I don't care if your for or against those types of laws, but if we go through the legislative effort to give up the economical efficiency for the social good and pass those laws, than you damn well better contribute to said social good if you want to do business on our shores
It doesn't absolve Apple or other companies (or me), but it does make Apple an odd target to fix on.
The reality is there's no way the company can make that change on the basis of "it's the right thing to do" without also being able to convincingly argue that it's better for long term shareholder value.
Apple can walk away from China whenever it wants to. Apple is the one company in the entire world best equipped with the cash to make this kind of public stand. But it doesn't want to because doing so will cost a lot of that money.
The only thing stopping Apple from closing its Chinese stores, and moving manufacturing to another country is fear of the faceless shareholder bots that have no AI for morality, and will punish Apple for doing the right thing.
Every time I see Tim Cook on stage patting himself on the back for making some minor environmental improvement because it's the right thing to do, I can't help but think it's all a farce because incremental environmental improvements aren't even low-hanging fruit. They're the fruit that has already fallen from the tree and rolled through his front door into his kitchen.
If Mr. Cook and the rest of his company want to impress, then do something hard.
Disclosure: Apple shareholder, with morality, but not enough shares for Apple to care.
Not unless they've spent the last decade building a secret duplicate supply chain ecosystem.
See for example https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/business/apple-california...
If you really cared about this, shouldn't you sell your Apple stocks and invest in a company with morals compatible with yours instead? Otherwise, you're part of the problem as you're willing to profit from China just like Apple.
Actually, if you really cared about this, I think it'd be better buy more Apple stock and start making a fuss in their shareholder meetings.
The decision isn't free, and that is the problem everyone is pointing out. You can't expect companies to "do the right thing" when it gets in the way of profit. The only way to make that happen is to put massive PR pressure on them to do "the right thing" whatever you believe that to be.
Bad PR isn't enough. It takes convincing A LOT of customers to stop buying their products or convincing A LOT of shareholders to stop holding their stock. Public opinion is just a loose proxy for expected revenue - if revenue doesn't at least look like it might begin to significantly suffer, nothing is likely to change.
They will comply with legal orders in China. Nowhere does it say they shared the private keys to the servers.
They have to share data:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...
> And even though Chinese iPhones will retain the security features that can make it all but impossible for anyone, even Apple, to get access to the phone itself, that will not apply to the iCloud accounts. Any information in the iCloud account could be accessible to Chinese authorities who can present Apple with a legal order.
> Apple said it will only respond to valid legal requests in China, but China’s domestic legal process is very different than that in the U.S., lacking anything quite like an American “warrant” reviewed by an independent court, Chinese legal experts said. Court approval isn’t required under Chinese law and police can issue and execute warrants.
Previous to this, the data was stored on American servers and subject to American legal safeguards.
Does it count as "encrypted" if the keys have been given to the people spying on you?
Asking "have you audited the source" is such a meaningless question when you're not building from source (and auditing the compiler...), which practically nobody, not even HN users, are doing.
Please read Reflections on trusting trust and rethink what your threat model is, and what you consider "secure". https://www.archive.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p7...
Because the original definition of FAANG was for the investor crowd, and looked at companies solely from the perspective of their stock performance and "potential growth". Microsoft wasn't supposed to be good at either back when this was coined.
We now use it in very different contexts, though, such as when discussing employment practices and internal work culture of those companies. In that particular context, I think Microsoft does belong there.
I always assumed it was because they're not headquartered in Silicon Valley.
I understand if someone working variable part time[1] hours for minimum wage cannot afford to lose their job. There isn't any room for sacrifices when you already have to e.g. decide each month if you can afford to pay for both food and utilities, or if you aren't going to have hot water for a while[2]. Yet even though they face far higher risks than the average tech worker, sometimes they still choose to make sacrifices[3].
Yes, you might get fired. You might have to adjust your standard of living. Banding together into larger groups can help to mitigate some of these costs, but regardless, the average tech worker is fortunate enough to be able to make a significant sacrifice.
[ This is why some of us try to warn about growing problems early, when the cost of counteraction is low. Unfortunately, most people decide to ignore the problem because it isn't an obvious, widespread, damaging problem. ~sigh~ ]
[1] different, computer-optimized schedule each week, could be anything that still counts as part time (including 0)
[2] https://medium.com/@sarahkendzior/the-minimum-wage-worker-st...
"But what about Apple" is a very specific conversational tactic, accurately named: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
If they had a "show censored results" checkbox would that be acceptable? Or is Google search currently blocked entirely and trying to get unblocked is the moral dilemma? I'm just trying to understand the moral difference.
If you are going to deliberately kill someone who you know is going to be murdered by someone else anyway, before they do that, are you a murderer?
I would dare say that most people would say "yes". The law certainly sees it that way.
Who attacked Google in this thread? Who, precisely, is being hypocritical?
ref: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
> Messages in iCloud also uses end-to-end encryption. If you have iCloud Backup turned on, your backup includes a copy of the key protecting your Messages. This ensures you can recover your Messages if you lose access to iCloud Keychain and your trusted devices. When you turn off iCloud Backup, a new key is generated on your device to protect future messages and isn't stored by Apple.
"Your choice is, do you participate or do you stand on the sideline and yell at how things should be," Mr. Cook said. "My own view very strongly is you show up and you participate, you get in the arena, because nothing ever changes from the sideline." [1]
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-tim-cook-no-point-yellin...
I can't resist to post a meme here
https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/censorship/chinas-...
Google does. If not 20%, around that number....
Trailing P/E 38.67
Forward P/E 1 21.87
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/key-statistics?p=GOOGL