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There might be many tech companies in China, no doubt, including big names, and companies should comply with local regulations if they want to do business, howe

There might be many tech companies in China, no doubt, including big names, and companies should comply with local regulations if they want to do business, however the fact that Google pulled their search engine out of China, defying their censorship attempts, is one big reason for why I respected Google, in spite of my reservations for them. So let me tell you what I think as an EU citizen that's actively concerned about both freedom of speech and privacy ... I couldn't give a crap about what companies are active in China and complying with their local regulations. That Google took a stand showed they valued freedom of speech above their bottom line, but now if they are going back in, we can talk about the primary concern with Google ... Google is the destroyer of privacy. Google tracks their users at an unprecedented level in the whole history of humanity and if they do this, we now have concrete proof that they don't have values that are above their bottom line. Therefore we have a problem and the next time the EU slaps them with another multi-billion fine for violating EU's anti-trust or privacy laws, I'll cheer them for it, because it's all about the dough.

at-fates-hands 8y ago
> we now have concrete proof that they don't have values that are above their bottom line. I had the same reaction. Back in the day, there was this common belief tech companies had a certain set of values and would draw a line. Now? It's always about the money. Welcome to the decline of Western Civilization.
- fullshark 8y ago
  That previous position seems insanely naive now. I wonder if western civilization is actually propped up by a collective naivety among its population.
bilbo0s 8y ago
"...Google is the destroyer of privacy. Google tracks their users at an unprecedented level in the whole history of humanity..." In fairness, you never had a problem with that privacy invasion before. You still respected them in spite of the fact that they were Gestapo-like privacy invaders. As evidenced by your claim that, "...the fact that Google pulled their search engine out of China, defying their censorship attempts, is one big reason for why I respected Google..." I've always been wary of Google. They are not our friends. They are here trying to make money off of us. They would sell any one of us out to any number of governments if they were asked. And they would do so without hesitation. That's the reason that we need to be mindful of what we disclose to companies like Google, Facebook, et al.
- bad_user 8y ago
  Well no, I did have a problem, I moved off GSuite to FastMail, I moved off Android, I'm a DuckDuckGo user, I went back to Firefox even before the Quantum release. But I had a lot of respect for Google for pulling out of China on censorship considerations and in fairness (unlike others) they seemed fairly responsible with how they treated the data they collect. Their security at least has been top notch, plus I've seen G employees with good values and a voice. But seeing them backtrack on a decision that I respected is pretty bad. I mean, it's worse if they've never pulled out of China in the first place. Because now I start thinking it was all a marketing stunt.
  - shazow 8y ago
    Except there is clear evidence that FastMail employees are able and willing to read through your personal emails, and they've become actively user-hostile in their support: https://twitter.com/shazow/status/1021570521987731458 https://twitter.com/shazow/status/1021570521987731458 Make of it what you will, but I worked at Google for a time and I came out more convinced that my data is safer there. This was 2012 so maybe things have changed since then, but we need better alternatives than things like FastMail (and I'd argue Firefox, but that's for another thread).
    - pacala 8y ago
      Employee A reading email X does not scale. Google reading everyone's email with ever-better AI systems does scale, and is a much bigger threat to freedom, political or economical.
      - yifanl 8y ago
        You don't need deep machine learning to write a simple script to fetch data from your servers. If Google can read all Gmail users' emails, Fastmail can read all their users' emails.
        goliatone 8y ago
iamshs 8y ago
Now that the plan is out in the open that Google has an active development project that censors the web with trivial government input, India will try to shoehorn Google into putting this into production with Indian populace. It will lead to degradation of democracy, while Google should be doing opposite since they bring the whole web to the user. Honestly, very very disconcerting from Google. Indian democracy is already fickle and project like this will accelerate the process even further. Also, minorities will be threatened even more since their vernacular is not on Google and English media news is not consumed by them. They live on local language news mainly, and they remain aloof from bigger machinations of the government against them. Absolutely appalling thinking about the future with this in use because India won't be able to push this project right now, but who knows what will happen when they are $5 Trillion economy 10-15 years from now. How come Sundar Pichai having an Indian background, didn't think about this aspect? Googlers please think about this one, and not endanger minorities because English language media in India is already biased and pushes officially sanctioned lines a lot, especially when it comes to minorities. Don't murder them please.
meesles 8y ago
Only yesterday, a coworker and I were discussing how $5.5 billion is something like 5% of Google's cash reserves. All-in-all, not the end of the world. My question in the end was: is $5.5 billion every few years actually enough to deter privacy violations by Google?
econ4all 8y ago
Not to interrupt another google bashing session on this site or stop an EU person from self-righteously patting themselves on the back but conflating several issues to justify political reprisal is exactly what's wrong with the EU's fine issuance regime and ad-hominem attacks on companies to try and justify the practice to yourself doesn't make it look better. Also "anti-trust" is an american term with historical context (you use the generic term), we invented the practice, and unlike you we don't use it as a political and protectionist tool.
- fixermark 8y ago
  It's a different standard of measurement. American anti-trust is about preventing a monopoly from harming consumers via perverse incentives; European anti-trust is about preventing a competitor from driving other laborers out of the market (less emphasis placed on the end-result to the consumer). Case in point (though it was France-specific, it highlights the difference in viewpoint): Amazon was fined by the French government because their discounts + Amazon Prime discount exceeded a legal limit of how deep a discount you were allowed to give on books. That limit was in place due to lobbying efforts by the book-seller's guild; it has nothing to do with bringing consumers the lowest price possible and everything to do with preventing individual sellers from driving each other out of business via short-term loss-leading discounts. Whether or not Amazon could offer its discounts because of more-efficient processes that minimize their overhead (such as being able to ship books to people only when needed instead of holding a bunch of brick-and-mortar real-estate to locally warehouse unsold merchandise) doesn't even enter into the discussion---drop below the critical price, pay the fine.
  - ionised 8y ago
    > It's a different standard of measurement. American anti-trust is about preventing a monopoly from harming consumers via perverse incentives; European anti-trust is about preventing a competitor from driving other laborers out of the market (less emphasis placed on the end-result to the consumer). Which is odd, as I would say the EU have a far more impressive record of protecting the consumer than the US has.
mahranch 8y ago
> pulled their search engine out of China, defying their censorship attempts They didn't pull their search engine out of China because of censorship requests, they pulled their search engine because the government kept trying to hack them and steal their source code, which they eventually did. So Google up and left. Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303493904575167290011111402 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303493904575167... They like to cite censorship and free speech to look better, but they knew exactly what they were getting into before setting foot in China -- the government of China made specific requirements before they could do business in China and Google agreed to those requirements. In fact, Google was criticized heavily for doing so. So don't buy into their history revisionism, they were on board with censorship from day 1. They had to be, or the PRC wouldn't allow them in.
- degenerate 8y ago
  Full article: http://archive.is/eOm2B http://archive.is/eOm2B Thanks for sharing, I've only ever heard the "PR" flavor of why they left. This makes more sense.
  - DogOnTheWeb 8y ago
    Stephen Levy covers it heavily in "In The Plex". If my memory serves, they censored Google.cn, but did not block users in China from the un-censored Google.com. The PRC alternated between blocking and unblocking .com. My understanding of the final straw was the hacking of gmail to steal the communications and network info of Chinese dissidents and activists. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#Giving_up_Google_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#Giving_up_Google_...
    - mkol2 8y ago
      That was all part of the official story. It was "only" about 8 years ago so it is available online as well as on HN. "A new approach to China" http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048800 "A new approach to China: an update" http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-approach-to-china-update.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-approach-to-china... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1211090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1211090 "China condemns decision by Google to lift censorship" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8582233.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8582233.stm
Aunche 8y ago
> Google is the destroyer of privacy. Google tracks their users at an unprecedented level in the whole history of humanity and if they do this, we now have concrete proof that they don't have values that are above their bottom line. Sure Google stores a lot of data about me, but why should I be worried? They haven't done anything malicious with it. All user data from Google stays on Google, so how is that any different from storing personal photos on Dropbox?
- cuckcuckspruce 8y ago
  How do you know it stays with Google? From Google's Privacy Policy: We provide personal information to our affiliates and other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on our instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures. For example, we use service providers to help us with customer support.
  - rapnie 8y ago
    And even without that, if they allow very specific groups of people to be targeted based on very detailed criteria, with very specific ads.. then your data still leaks to unknown 3rd parties, though indirectly.
- wu-ikkyu 8y ago
  >Sure Google stores a lot of data about me, but why should I be worried? They haven't done anything malicious with it. >All user data from Google stays on Google No, there is no company who cannot be hacked, whether from an insider or an outsider. Big data is what enabled the operational efficiency of the Holocaust[1]. Imagine the mass scale, micro targeted cyber attacks a bad person could do with a little programming/algorithms knowledge and a data dump of the most detailed psychological/demographical profiles in history on billions of people. Google and FB are building dual-use tools of mass destruction/manipulation. While they may only use it for advertising, there are plenty of worse things it could be used for. Plain old censorship is just getting your toes wet. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
ataturk 8y ago
What bothers me is that Google would be happy using China as the baseline, iow, mass censorship and silo-ing of information.
zavi 8y ago
It's equally wrong from the moral standpoint to operate in China under CPC as in EU under the Right to be Forgotten and the likes (censorship is censorship). But I'm not sure if avoiding these two markets altogether is a practical strategy given the rise of Chinese tech competitors. It's sad but I think the short period of history during which free speech was celebrated is coming to an end.
longcheng 8y ago
Google envies the huge amount of data Baidu enjoys. In this AI/ML age, data is gold. China is the biggest gold mining field. If I were China government, I would block Google for its bluff made/called in 2010.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
> That Google took a stand showed they valued freedom of speech above their bottom line,... And now their bottom line is getting closer to their top line so they re-evaluate these sorts of decisions. From an economics point of view it gives you a nice concrete way to evaluate how how much they value their principles relative to their profitability. Unfortunately you need access to some additional detail which you can't get from outside sources to put an actual number to it.
sdkaufman 8y ago
This logic seems rather strange to me. If you're unhappy with Google's privacy practices, by all means boycott Google services and cheer for the EU fines. But why would you judge Google's privacy practices any differently depending on whether or not they cooperate with Chinese censorship? e.g. Why should Google get a free pass for any user privacy malpractices even if they promote freedom of speech on the side? Conversely, why should Google be penalized more for any user privacy malpractices if they _didn't_ promote freedom of speech on the side? It's not like a company can be simply judged as "good" or "bad" on a single dimension.

at-fates-hands 8y ago

> we now have concrete proof that they don't have values that are above their bottom line. I had the same reaction. Back in the day, there was this common belief tech companies had a certain set of values and would draw a line. Now? It's always about the money. Welcome to the decline of Western Civilization.

fullshark 8y ago
That previous position seems insanely naive now. I wonder if western civilization is actually propped up by a collective naivety among its population.

bilbo0s 8y ago

"...Google is the destroyer of privacy. Google tracks their users at an unprecedented level in the whole history of humanity..." In fairness, you never had a problem with that privacy invasion before. You still respected them in spite of the fact that they were Gestapo-like privacy invaders. As evidenced by your claim that, "...the fact that Google pulled their search engine out of China, defying their censorship attempts, is one big reason for why I respected Google..." I've always been wary of Google. They are not our friends. They are here trying to make money off of us. They would sell any one of us out to any number of governments if they were asked. And they would do so without hesitation. That's the reason that we need to be mindful of what we disclose to companies like Google, Facebook, et al.

bad_user 8y ago
Well no, I did have a problem, I moved off GSuite to FastMail, I moved off Android, I'm a DuckDuckGo user, I went back to Firefox even before the Quantum release. But I had a lot of respect for Google for pulling out of China on censorship considerations and in fairness (unlike others) they seemed fairly responsible with how they treated the data they collect. Their security at least has been top notch, plus I've seen G employees with good values and a voice. But seeing them backtrack on a decision that I respected is pretty bad. I mean, it's worse if they've never pulled out of China in the first place. Because now I start thinking it was all a marketing stunt.
- shazow 8y ago
  Except there is clear evidence that FastMail employees are able and willing to read through your personal emails, and they've become actively user-hostile in their support: https://twitter.com/shazow/status/1021570521987731458 https://twitter.com/shazow/status/1021570521987731458 Make of it what you will, but I worked at Google for a time and I came out more convinced that my data is safer there. This was 2012 so maybe things have changed since then, but we need better alternatives than things like FastMail (and I'd argue Firefox, but that's for another thread).
  - pacala 8y ago
    Employee A reading email X does not scale. Google reading everyone's email with ever-better AI systems does scale, and is a much bigger threat to freedom, political or economical.
    - yifanl 8y ago
      You don't need deep machine learning to write a simple script to fetch data from your servers. If Google can read all Gmail users' emails, Fastmail can read all their users' emails.
      - goliatone 8y ago

iamshs 8y ago

Now that the plan is out in the open that Google has an active development project that censors the web with trivial government input, India will try to shoehorn Google into putting this into production with Indian populace. It will lead to degradation of democracy, while Google should be doing opposite since they bring the whole web to the user. Honestly, very very disconcerting from Google. Indian democracy is already fickle and project like this will accelerate the process even further. Also, minorities will be threatened even more since their vernacular is not on Google and English media news is not consumed by them. They live on local language news mainly, and they remain aloof from bigger machinations of the government against them. Absolutely appalling thinking about the future with this in use because India won't be able to push this project right now, but who knows what will happen when they are $5 Trillion economy 10-15 years from now. How come Sundar Pichai having an Indian background, didn't think about this aspect? Googlers please think about this one, and not endanger minorities because English language media in India is already biased and pushes officially sanctioned lines a lot, especially when it comes to minorities. Don't murder them please.

meesles 8y ago

Only yesterday, a coworker and I were discussing how $5.5 billion is something like 5% of Google's cash reserves. All-in-all, not the end of the world. My question in the end was: is $5.5 billion every few years actually enough to deter privacy violations by Google?

econ4all 8y ago

Not to interrupt another google bashing session on this site or stop an EU person from self-righteously patting themselves on the back but conflating several issues to justify political reprisal is exactly what's wrong with the EU's fine issuance regime and ad-hominem attacks on companies to try and justify the practice to yourself doesn't make it look better. Also "anti-trust" is an american term with historical context (you use the generic term), we invented the practice, and unlike you we don't use it as a political and protectionist tool.

fixermark 8y ago
It's a different standard of measurement. American anti-trust is about preventing a monopoly from harming consumers via perverse incentives; European anti-trust is about preventing a competitor from driving other laborers out of the market (less emphasis placed on the end-result to the consumer). Case in point (though it was France-specific, it highlights the difference in viewpoint): Amazon was fined by the French government because their discounts + Amazon Prime discount exceeded a legal limit of how deep a discount you were allowed to give on books. That limit was in place due to lobbying efforts by the book-seller's guild; it has nothing to do with bringing consumers the lowest price possible and everything to do with preventing individual sellers from driving each other out of business via short-term loss-leading discounts. Whether or not Amazon could offer its discounts because of more-efficient processes that minimize their overhead (such as being able to ship books to people only when needed instead of holding a bunch of brick-and-mortar real-estate to locally warehouse unsold merchandise) doesn't even enter into the discussion---drop below the critical price, pay the fine.
- ionised 8y ago
  > It's a different standard of measurement. American anti-trust is about preventing a monopoly from harming consumers via perverse incentives; European anti-trust is about preventing a competitor from driving other laborers out of the market (less emphasis placed on the end-result to the consumer). Which is odd, as I would say the EU have a far more impressive record of protecting the consumer than the US has.

mahranch 8y ago

> pulled their search engine out of China, defying their censorship attempts They didn't pull their search engine out of China because of censorship requests, they pulled their search engine because the government kept trying to hack them and steal their source code, which they eventually did. So Google up and left. Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303493904575167290011111402 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303493904575167... They like to cite censorship and free speech to look better, but they knew exactly what they were getting into before setting foot in China -- the government of China made specific requirements before they could do business in China and Google agreed to those requirements. In fact, Google was criticized heavily for doing so. So don't buy into their history revisionism, they were on board with censorship from day 1. They had to be, or the PRC wouldn't allow them in.

degenerate 8y ago
Full article: http://archive.is/eOm2B http://archive.is/eOm2B Thanks for sharing, I've only ever heard the "PR" flavor of why they left. This makes more sense.
- DogOnTheWeb 8y ago
  Stephen Levy covers it heavily in "In The Plex". If my memory serves, they censored Google.cn, but did not block users in China from the un-censored Google.com. The PRC alternated between blocking and unblocking .com. My understanding of the final straw was the hacking of gmail to steal the communications and network info of Chinese dissidents and activists. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#Giving_up_Google_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#Giving_up_Google_...
  - mkol2 8y ago
    That was all part of the official story. It was "only" about 8 years ago so it is available online as well as on HN. "A new approach to China" http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048800 "A new approach to China: an update" http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-approach-to-china-update.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-approach-to-china... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1211090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1211090 "China condemns decision by Google to lift censorship" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8582233.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8582233.stm

Aunche 8y ago

> Google is the destroyer of privacy. Google tracks their users at an unprecedented level in the whole history of humanity and if they do this, we now have concrete proof that they don't have values that are above their bottom line. Sure Google stores a lot of data about me, but why should I be worried? They haven't done anything malicious with it. All user data from Google stays on Google, so how is that any different from storing personal photos on Dropbox?

cuckcuckspruce 8y ago
How do you know it stays with Google? From Google's Privacy Policy: We provide personal information to our affiliates and other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on our instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures. For example, we use service providers to help us with customer support.
- rapnie 8y ago
  And even without that, if they allow very specific groups of people to be targeted based on very detailed criteria, with very specific ads.. then your data still leaks to unknown 3rd parties, though indirectly.
wu-ikkyu 8y ago
>Sure Google stores a lot of data about me, but why should I be worried? They haven't done anything malicious with it. >All user data from Google stays on Google No, there is no company who cannot be hacked, whether from an insider or an outsider. Big data is what enabled the operational efficiency of the Holocaust[1]. Imagine the mass scale, micro targeted cyber attacks a bad person could do with a little programming/algorithms knowledge and a data dump of the most detailed psychological/demographical profiles in history on billions of people. Google and FB are building dual-use tools of mass destruction/manipulation. While they may only use it for advertising, there are plenty of worse things it could be used for. Plain old censorship is just getting your toes wet. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

ataturk 8y ago

What bothers me is that Google would be happy using China as the baseline, iow, mass censorship and silo-ing of information.

zavi 8y ago

It's equally wrong from the moral standpoint to operate in China under CPC as in EU under the Right to be Forgotten and the likes (censorship is censorship). But I'm not sure if avoiding these two markets altogether is a practical strategy given the rise of Chinese tech competitors. It's sad but I think the short period of history during which free speech was celebrated is coming to an end.

longcheng 8y ago

Google envies the huge amount of data Baidu enjoys. In this AI/ML age, data is gold. China is the biggest gold mining field. If I were China government, I would block Google for its bluff made/called in 2010.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

> That Google took a stand showed they valued freedom of speech above their bottom line,... And now their bottom line is getting closer to their top line so they re-evaluate these sorts of decisions. From an economics point of view it gives you a nice concrete way to evaluate how how much they value their principles relative to their profitability. Unfortunately you need access to some additional detail which you can't get from outside sources to put an actual number to it.

sdkaufman 8y ago

This logic seems rather strange to me. If you're unhappy with Google's privacy practices, by all means boycott Google services and cheer for the EU fines. But why would you judge Google's privacy practices any differently depending on whether or not they cooperate with Chinese censorship? e.g. Why should Google get a free pass for any user privacy malpractices even if they promote freedom of speech on the side? Conversely, why should Google be penalized more for any user privacy malpractices if they _didn't_ promote freedom of speech on the side? It's not like a company can be simply judged as "good" or "bad" on a single dimension.