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The two latest articles from last week on HN about how Google is prepping to fully endorse China's censorship were posing these questions in the two most upvote
by guilamu 8y ago
The two latest articles from last week on HN about how Google is prepping to fully endorse China's censorship were posing these questions in the two most upvoted comments :
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685248
"Why is it unethical to launch a censored search product in China?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17703524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17703524
"What's the slippery slope here?"
Well, you have your answer today.
The unethical slippery slope is this one: when you start accepting censorship where do you stop?
Since this "ahoy" plug-in is making China's censorship inefficient, the logical step is to ban it to respect China's will to censor. But you have to ban it from everybody right? Otherwise, some people in China could access it with a VPN or a proxy.
So here we are.
In order to get a "attaboy" from China, Google starts censoring tools globally on their Chrome Store.
With great power comes great responsibility would say Ben Parker. So yes, IMHO even companies should have some kind of "morality", some redline they should/would not cross. Google used to have one not so long ago "Don't be evil", but that's ancient history.
- magicalist 8y ago> Since this "ahoy" plug-in is making China's censorship inefficient, the logical step is to ban it to respect China's will to censor. It allows access to sites banned in Portugal.
- hsribei 8y agoI didn't know Portugal was big on censorship. What kinds of sites are blocked?
- skybrian 8y agoWe don't "have an answer." We can speculate that they're related. If someone gets an answer out of them or it leaks, we will have an answer. Until then it's a mystery. (And even then, are you sure you should believe the answer?)
- godDLL 8y agoMystery is a detective murder story where the perp is known from the start but only revealed at the last page. This is at best a non-mystery.
- guilamu 8y agoWell, we do not have a "definitive" answer yet, but still. The plugin-in is open source and does not violate any of the Chrome Store TOS. No one at Google gave them any explanation for the ban nor answering any of their emails nor those from TorrentFreaks. https://torrentfreak.com/google-boots-open-source-anti-censorship-tool-from-chrome-store-180810/ https://torrentfreak.com/google-boots-open-source-anti-censo...
- kyrra 8y agoFYI, the original TF article has been updated with: ================================ Update2: Google responded to the people behind Ahoy! informing them that the extension was removed for not having an appropriate privacy policy. That will now be remedied and Ahoy! will be resubmitted to Google. ================================