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Google's censored Chinese search engine: a catalogue of ethical violations?

188 points by cpeterso 8y ago

c3534l 8y ago
It's really unfortunate that abiding by local laws and regulations is considered unethical. But even if we assume that there is no legal way for a company to operate ethically in China, is the world meant to close our borders to them entirely? 20% of the planet lives there and we do business with China every day when we buy something manufactured there, but do not feel morally required to boycott them on account of their government. Edit: to all the comments saying I equated lawful with ethical, please read my comment again. In particular the second sentence in which I clearly distinguish between the two.
- snek 8y ago
  Google Search provides information. Blocking access to information is, by the nature of the action, disenfranchising and oppressive. If Google were to re-enter the Chinese market, their Search product would either be controlled by the current government or they would be kicked out. I would argue that Google providing censored results is harmful to that 20%, so it is better to stay out.
  - caibkai 8y ago
    Baidu has monopolized power in Chinese market as a search engine. It sold advertisement to fake hospital and ranked the advertisement as a top searching result. A young Chinese student died because of the fake hospital advertisement (Wei Zexi scandal). A censored google can still create more competition. How could it be harmful to that 20%?
    - mirimir 8y ago
      Because everyone knows that Baidu is government-controlled. So google.cn, even though many would know that it's also compromised, would basically be a honeypot. It would be far better for access to Google to remain dependent on VPN and Tor. And in that regard, it'd be very cool if Google didn't block Tor exits.
      - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
        Baidu is not government controlled, just submissive to it. Though it operates under the credo of “ask for forgiveness rather than permission” like almost every other Chinese tech company, so even that relationship is complicated.
        reaperducer 8y ago
        Like a dog on a leash isn't controlled by its owner, it's just submissive to him? Riiiiiight. If Baidu was really doing anything independent, then it would get reined in, like the overseas Chinese real estate firms are. As for censorship: "According to the China Digital Times, Baidu has a long history of being the most active and restrictive online censor in the search arena. Documents leaked in April 2009 from an employee in Baidu's internal monitoring and censorship department show a long list of blocked websites and censored topics on Baidu search." I don't think Baidu came up with that list all by itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu#Censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu#Censorship
        seanmcdirmid 8y ago
        I don't think you really get how Chinese businesses operate. Tech businesses, as long as they are Chinese, operate under an assumption of semi-impunity as long as they don't cross political boundaries. So healthcare fraud is in bounds, and if they get caught, they'll just get a slap on the wrist. Its not like the government condones the fraud, more like they don't care as long as it doesn't result in social instability. Real estate firms and other industries like taxi groups are more likely to be directly controlled by princelings, so those are something else altogether. The government has a direct channel into these industries, because they are basically like a state-controlled mafia.
        mirimir 8y ago
        > Tech businesses, as long as they are Chinese, operate under an assumption of semi-impunity as long as they don't cross political boundaries. So healthcare fraud is in bounds, and if they get caught, they'll just get a slap on the wrist. Wait. So are you arguing that Chinese tech businesses are under state control, or that they aren't? Your examples point to a horrible compromise: political censorship with freedom to defraud the public.
    - reaperducer 8y ago
      A censored google can still create more competition. A censored Google isn't more competition. It's just more of what already exists, with different branding.
- ben_jones 8y ago
  > It's really unfortunate that abiding by local laws and regulations is considered unethical. What about local laws in countries that are deeply homophobic? Is it unfortunate if countries don't hand over lists of gay users?
  - amarkov 8y ago
    Certainly not. But is Google planning to hand over lists of users who search for banned terms? It seems like there's a big difference between handing over lists of users and restricting information.
    - xiii1408 8y ago
      They'll almost certainly hand over user data to the central government. They're required to partner with a Chinese firm, and this is a fairly common practice among Chinese technology companies.
    - Analemma_ 8y ago
      > But is Google planning to hand over lists of users who search for banned terms? Yes? That's so obvious I'm a little stunned you're even asking. If the government orders them to hand over that information, they won't have any choice.
    - kodablah 8y ago
      > It seems like there's a big difference between handing over lists of users and restricting information. I think what you're not understanding is it's not Google doing this vs that, it's Google doing what they are told, whatever that may be, or leaving.
- rhcom2 8y ago
  > It's really unfortunate that abiding by local laws and regulations is considered unethical. Laws anywhere are never a guarantee of ethics and not having Google help build part of a censored internet in China is not the same as closing our border to them entirely.
- astebbin 8y ago
  Local laws in East Berlin sanctioned the murder of Germans who sought to escape. Local laws in Vichy France required people to report hidden Jews to the police. Local laws in America under Jim Crow forbade interracial marriage, and denied Blacks their right to vote. Would you consider it unfortunate that some held these local laws to be unethical? I’d ascribe no more legitimacy to similar laws made by an unelected, authoritarian government with a history of kidnapping, torturing, and killing nonviolent dissidents. I’m privately amazed that the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights is now a subject of controversy. Why do we believe the Chinese Communist Party when it says, “China is special, and the Chinese people do not deserve basic human freedoms?”
  - doombolt 8y ago
    "sanctioned the murder of Germans who sought to escape" I have read a page on capital punishment in Germany, found no such claims. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Germany https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_German...
    - astebbin 8y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Peter_Fechter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Peter_Fechter Many similar cases.
      - astebbin 8y ago
        I'd love to know why the parent has been downvoted. Further evidence, if any is needed: "The use of lethal force on the Berlin Wall was an integral part of the East German state's policy towards its border system." "The Stasi took charge of "corpse cases" and those injured while trying to cross the border, who were transported to hospitals run by the Stasi or the police where they would recuperate before being transferred to Stasi prisons. The Stasi also took sole responsibility for the disposal of the dead and their possessions. Bodies were not returned to relatives but were cremated, usually at the crematorium at Baumschulenweg. Occasionally the cost of the cremations was covered by the victims themselves using money taken from their pockets.[25] Stasi officers posing as policemen would inform the relatives, though not before trying to obtain "valuable pieces of information on the border violation". Deaths would be stated as being due to "a border provocation of his own causing", "a fatal accident of his own causing" or "drowning in a border waterway". Every border death was investigated in detail to identify how the attempt had been made, whether there were any vulnerabilities in the border system that needed to be remedied and whether anyone else had been involved. If necessary, the family, relatives, friends, colleagues and neighbours were put under surveillance." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deaths_at_the_Berlin_Wall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deaths_at_the_Berlin_W...
- xiii1408 8y ago
  No. It's not fair to justify building the machinery of a totalitarian state as simply "abiding by local laws and regulations." Not when the consequences involve clear violations of human rights. You don't have to look far to see how bad things have gotten recently in China, from abductions of booksellers in Hong Kong to an activist being carted away literally during a phone interview with Voice of America. When Western companies act like this is totally normal and even develop censorship technologies for regimes in countries with poor records for human rights, it lends false legitimacy to these unjust systems and even emboldens them to commit more serious violations of human rights.
  - throwaway2048 8y ago
    Don't forget them placing 1 million Uyghurs (and counting) in "re-education camps" designed to destroy their culture and religion.
    - justinjlynn 8y ago
      You mean engaging in actions that meet the UN-accepted definition of genocide? May as well just call it genocide.
    - vkou 8y ago
      The last residential 'school' (which was aimed to do the same for First Nations people) in Canada closed in 1996, with little more then a hummm-hummm. Our shit stinks almost as much.
      - denorm 8y ago
        Whataboutism is a really poor argument. The history of the West is full of atrocities, but that doesn't somehow excuse the Chinese government from current human rights abuses. Nor does it mean that I as a Westerner do not have the right to criticize the Chinese government. In fact we have an obligation to condemn human rights abuses wherever they occur.
        8y ago
- Sangermaine 8y ago
  >It's really unfortunate that abiding by local laws and regulations is considered unethical. What a disgusting comment. What is legal and what is ethical are not the same thing at all. I have difficulty believing this was written in good faith.
  - throwaway8879 8y ago
    And what is ethical exactly? Objectively? And this is something that you get to decide? Maximizing profits seems pretty ethical to me.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      It's something that everybody gets to decide for themselves. And then judge others accordingly.
    - mmirate 8y ago
      Ethics are inherently subjective, which is why their only actual usefulness is as a shorthand/proxy for "unlikelihood to generate bad press".
    - buth_lika 8y ago
      How come others have to have "objective" morals, but for you "seems to me" is perfectly fine? Of course it's subjective, that doesn't take away from it at all, since any opinion that it being subjective is a problem is subjective as well. > Maximizing profits seems pretty ethical to me. Up to extracting gold teeth from people murdered in concentration camps, or is there a limit for you? > [Q: Isn't there a certain calculus that someone who is sitting in the shoes of a Condoleezza Rice can make, that they're responsible for the best outcome for American citizens, and there's an upside of going into Iraq which is we get one of the greatest material possessions in world's history, and there're downsides which are: we upset the international community, and maybe there's more terrorism. Couldn't you envision a calculus where they say, sure, that's the reason, and it's a good reason, let's do it. What's the flaw in the calculus?] > Oh, I think that's exactly their calculus. But then we ought to just be honest and say, "Look, we're a bunch of Nazis." So fine, let's just drop all the discussion, we save a lot of trees, we can throw out the newspapers and most of the scholarly literature, and just come out, state it straight, and tell the truth: we'll do whatever we want because we think we're gonna gain by it. And incidently, it's not American citizens who'll gain. They don't gain by this. It's narrow sectors of domestic power that the administration is serving with quite unusual dedication... -- Noam Chomsky, Talk titled "Why Iraq?" at Harvard University, November 4, 2002
- lx3459683 8y ago
  > It's really unfortunate that abiding by local laws and regulations is considered unethical. Ethical and legal are two entirely different concepts. What's really unfortunate is there's a significant number of people who haven't been able to break out of their indoctrination to equate these things and to follow laws without questioning them or assessing the ethics involved. The overwhelming majority of laws is written by the rich and powerful to represent their interests, which are entirely divorced from ethics. It is the ethical responsibility of every individual to refuse to abide by those laws and act to change them. We can't pretend that your kind of viewpoint is acceptable. We have had too many historical examples of people committing some of the worst atrocities of all time while abiding by the laws of the time and 'just following orders'. I'm upvoting you so we can keep this terrifying sentiment at the top of the thread for all to see and discuss.
- ataturk 8y ago
  We don't have to close them off entirely, but we do have to acknowledge the problem in our faces. Google would be happy to apply the censorship worldwide, not just in China! If Western culture isn't dead, if our Western legal traditions mean anything at all (I'm talking about individual rights here) then we have to fight the good fight for ourselves and on behalf of those who can't. Otherwise we'll succumb to the least common denominator because technocrats simply don't care. I'll tell you the truth--I don' think the new generation in SV has any understanding of history whatsoever. I think they believe they are the most brilliant, infallible people in the world. So I don't have a great outlook on what our future holds because it's always like this when a generation arrogantly forgets the past and thinks that nothing bad can ever happen. SV is almost 100% Democrats, coincidence?
- Leary 8y ago
  Google's situation is similar to many American authors' experience when confronted with the choice of 1) not publishing in China. and 2) publishing a censored version of their book. The decision is not an easy one, even for those who support freedom of information. Those who deem Google's actions unethical often fail to realize that without Google or foreign books, Chinese internet users and readers will have less access to information. Peter Hessler, an American writer detailed such the discussion of censorship in the West https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/09/travels-with-my-censor https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/09/travels-with-m... "Western commentary about censorship often turns inward, portraying limitations in other countries in a way that celebrates our own values. One of the most striking qualities of foreign portrayals of censorship in China is the apparent lack of interest in Chinese readers and editors. "
  - int_19h 8y ago
    There is a very simple and clear line, actually. The moment you have to write a single line of code to specifically enable political censorship, you're complicit in it. Such as in this case, where they're not just talking about e.g. taking down links in search results when asked, but inserting new code into the entire Android software stack, or even writing new apps outright, to enable such censorship. And yes, of course it celebrates our own values. Why should we use any other values to judge our companies? If they don't want to be subject to this, they can always split their Chinese branch away entirely, and let it be run by the locals. Then it would be a Chinese internal matter. But when software engineers in California are implementing censorship for Chinese government, they're going to be criticized by the standards that apply in California.
    - dcbadacd 8y ago
      > but inserting new code into the entire Android software stack, or even writing new apps outright, to enable such censorship. Let's not forget Apple already has done this with iOS. It's just worth mentioning that this isn't Google-specific.
  - qudat 8y ago
    > portraying limitations in other countries in a way that celebrates our own values. This rings very true to me. Like others have commented in this thread, google is unethical because "they are disrupting the foundations of democracy by abiding by totalitarian rules" as if democracy is the one True form of governance.
- chillacy 8y ago
  Sounds like there's a parallel with boycotts of Apartheid South Africa? Anyways I think the best answer for society to the general question of "if there's no legal way for a company to operate ethically, should it not?" is a resounding yes. However game theory will ensure that in absence of external pressure (via regulation or public sentiment), companies will try to serve the market for profit.
- est 8y ago
  > It's really unfortunate that abiding by local laws and regulations is considered unethical No, it's that speaking up against local "laws" and quit, then come back again that's unethical.
- denorm 8y ago
  "Abiding by local laws and regulations" is a veil behind which international companies hide, claiming lack of responsibility for actions that many of us would consider unethical. Just as with Yahoo's outing of Chinese dissidents[0], at some point companies in China (like Apple, now hosting iCloud data in Guizhou) are going to be forced to hand over data to the Chinese government in order to "abide by local laws". Cue the "but the NSA collects all our data, anyway" arguments.. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Yahoo!#Outing_of_Chinese_dissidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Yahoo!#Outing_of_...
- buth_lika 8y ago
  > It's really unfortunate that abiding by local laws and regulations is considered unethical. It seems unfortunate to you, because you are not aware of the thought and research that went into this insight, and the roughly 100 million dead people.
  - dang 8y ago
    We've banned this account for continuing to use HN primarily for ideological warfare despite many requests to stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
drivingmenuts 8y ago
Are there Chinese citizens who are members of the ACM who also work for their government? If so, how does that square?
loukrazy 8y ago
If Google employees are pushing back projects with the US govt I can’t imagine this will sit well at all
- ronnier 8y ago
  My guess is, it’ll sit just fine with them and we won’t see any push back.
  - codeka 8y ago
    What makes you say that? See, eg https://theintercept.com/2018/08/03/google-search-engine-china-censorship-backlash/ https://theintercept.com/2018/08/03/google-search-engine-chi...
    - reaperducer 8y ago
      Maybe because, according to your link, hundreds of people inside Google knew about this for over a year and said nothing? It's one thing for a plan like this to be secret among a bunch of C-levels in a boardroom for a week. It's something else when HUNDREDS of people are involved, and a product is ready to deploy. That indicates a cultural problem within the company. More evidence of that (again from your link): "Company managers responded by swiftly trying to shut down employees’ access to any documents that contained information about the China censorship project, according to Google insiders who witnessed the backlash."
    - zaarn 8y ago
      In another thread about this I asked a Googler, who was outraged of being accussed to have done nothing about it or planning to do nothing about, what they planned to do and there was no response at all. Googlers don't care, they get to have Google on their resume!
claydavisss 8y ago
Yet you all cheer when the SPLC implements thoughtcrime right here in the "land of the free". I hate to indulge the cliche "snowflake", but the notions you all have of what should and shouldn't be on the web is increasingly looking like what your professor told you to think. Or do only white Americans get to decide what is "hate speech"? Why won't you respect what other cultures determine "hateful"? You certainly expect them to accept your notions...
AntiGameZ 8y ago
Some people at China desperately want to access Google for a better search experience. Is a 80% percent of Google better than no Google at all for Chinese people? If people is dying and you have the cure with a little bit stains, is the ethical violated if you save people with a imperfect way or just let the pantient to die is a better option?
- throwaway484722 8y ago
  No, because currently they’re forced to use a VPN and see the full thing, which is what most people do because results are way better than Baidu (even in 中文).
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  It is akin to embargo ethics essentially. Technically buying coal from North Korea can help feed the people but by supporting their government you help prolong their power and thus lead to more suffering. It is ethically messy on the right side even. Similarly by not giving them access to what they know the rest of the world has you breed discontent with the current way of doing things. The culture and thus indirect demand flows regardless of what they do like rock music into the USSR. It also isn't an absolute denial - google would gladly step back into China with no ethical qualms if they abandoned their censorship policies. Their government would find it unthinkable however.
aaron695 8y ago
Google first censored in I think France at least 10 years ago ( and still does ) so stop the hypocrisy and clean up our backyard first. Defend Alex Jones etc or go home.
intralizee 8y ago
I'm happy I never put in the hours studying algorithms to work at Google. Whatever happened to following their slogan?
- gcb0 8y ago
  Money. And people are loving it. I doubt anybody will ask who designed this immoral plan on the next investor meeting. If they ask, it will be for praises.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  Public shareholders and their destructive unrealistic expectations. They expect to see growth continue regardless of the size of the company when risk/stability and rate of growth are in an inverse relationship equilibrium (low risk-high returns eventually leads to more investment which leads to diminished returns, high risk leads to less investment which means better margins from lack of competition if the risk pays off). They have proven downright allergic to long-term planning in favor of the short term.
miguelrochefort 8y ago
What's the difference between Google adopting Chinese regulations in China and Google adopting GDPR regulations in Europe?
- dsr_ 8y ago
  When a company does something good for human rights and civilization, we say "Good." When they do something bad for human rights and civilization, we say "Bad." What's the deal with pretending that laws are ethically neutral?
  - miguelrochefort 8y ago
    Is Google doing something bad for human rights and civilization?
- kerng 8y ago
  I'm not sure if that is a serious question or just a sarcastic comment?
- kodablah 8y ago
  I'm anti-GDPR and even I see that as a poor equivalence. The difference? Morality, so maybe to you there's no difference but to others it's obvious. The implementation difference, EU hasn't started large-scale blocking of sites that violate its laws (yet).
  - miguelrochefort 8y ago
    China does what it thinks is best for itself. The compromise is crippling of free speech. I don't like that. Europe does what it thinks is best for itself. The compromise is crippling of innovation. I don't like that. Are they doing the right thing? I don't think so. Is it legitimate for them to do so? Probably. Personally, I believe the best solution is to break the rule. Ignore all regulations (hate speech, GDPR, copyrights, patents, net neutrality, China's firewall) and make it easy for people to do the same thing. They won't be able to enforce their unreasonable regulations, and they'll have to repeal them. That's what I intend to do.
ansy 8y ago
At the risk of sounding nationalistic, I think companies in the United States and other democratic countries should reconsider any and all business relationships with authoritarian regimes like those in China and Russia. And I say regimes because most "companies" in these countries are really just instruments of the state. There may be money to be made, but not only are companies like Google tightening these authoritarian regimes' grips on millions and billions of people, but they are undermining the foundations of democracy by strengthening those who choose to crush it in their own countries. I have no business of my own to withdraw from China or Russia. But if I did, I would look to send my investments to Taiwain, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand instead.
- smallnamespace 8y ago
  > I have no business of my own to withdraw from China or Russia. That's probably untrue from the face of it, just from the amount of products and goods that are produced in whole or in part in China. In fact, for many products, good luck finding a choice that doesn't directly or indirectly lead to money ending up in the coffers of the Chinese businesses, which is just one hop away from tax revenues of the Chinese state. But, like, everyone also directly buys or depends on gasoline, which indirectly funds plenty of unpleasantly authoritarian regimes. What I'm curious is how anyone can have clean hands when everything is just shades of grey in a global, fully-connected economy where everyone is just a few hops from everyone else.
  - klodolph 8y ago
    > That's probably untrue from the face of it, just from the amount of products and goods that are produced in whole or in part in China. That’s the same way that clothing brands deal with the problem of having their products made in sweat shops. Brand X makes their clothes in sweat shops, there’s an exposé, brand X does an investigation, finds that contractor Y hired subcontractor Z without the right controls in place, and then fires subcontractor Z. But subcontractor Z was just doing business with the actual sweatshop W, and after subcontractor Z is fired, contractor Y hires a new subcontractor Z', which then later rehires W because they’re the cheapest (after the media attention cools down). Round and round it goes. Because there’s such a large chain, from brand X to contractor Y to subcontractor Z and finally sweat shop W, brand X has very weak and indirect control over the conditions in sweat shop W. This is by design, and it’s encouraged by the way our legal system works. Each link is an isolated domain with limited liability, than can be destroyed and replaced separately from the rest. On top of that, jurisdictional issues prevent the arm of the law from effectively addressing sweat shop W from the country where brand X exists, especially since contractors Y and Z might also be in completely separate countries. The economic pressure to be the cheapest encourages people to take ethical and legal shortcuts, to keep plausible deniability you make the supply chain long enough, and then whenever it blows up the blast radius is only as large as a single, replaceable link in the chain. And so we get back to the idea that you can simply satisfy yourself by not personally doing business with China or Russia. The entire system is set up to pander to people who want to do things “ethically” by hiding all of the unethical behavior far away at the other end of the supply chain. You can pat yourself on the back for not buying Kathy Lee Gifford or Nike, but you turn around and buy clothing at prices so low they can only be reliably sourced from workshops with the same terrible conditions. I’m not arguing that the alternative is to turn a blind eye, but I don’t think outrage at individual companies that do business with the wrong countries is a meaningful choice that we can make. I’m not talking about companies like Nestlé, yes, let’s be plenty pissed off at Nestlé. But if we’re going to change this, the reach of the law should be longer. If brand X were liable for conditions in sweatshop W, financially, then that kind of hazard would be priced into all of the contracts all the way down the chain. This is called “extraterritorial jurisdiction” and it has precedent, like Australia’s Crimes (Child Sex Tourism) Amendment Act 1994.
628C6l0 8y ago
Honestly, the censored stuff is crap anyways. Reading the censored stuff is what leads people to devote their lives to "politics", "activism", and "social justice", and away from the really good stuff such as math, science, and philosophy, which the Chinese government never blocked. Any time spent on the activism stuff is time you are not spending on genuinely meaningful and personally fulfilling pursuits. In a sense, political activity is like playing video games and doing drugs, except more dangerous because you don't tend to feel as guilty for spending a lot of time on it. I think it's a good thing that drugs are generally banned, but there are also such things as "drugs of the mind" such as video games and political agitations and I don't see why reasons for banning the former shouldn't generalize to at least some of the latter
- buttholesurfer 8y ago
  Wow.
- crazygringo 8y ago
  This is perhaps the greatest example of Poe's Law I've ever seen... I... hope? Otherwise, I genuinely don't even know where to begin...
- buth_lika 8y ago
  Here's a book tip. > The type of personal integration we attain – or the effective lack thereof – depends on what possibilities our life situation offers us for the development of autonomy. It is a distorted development that is the root cause of the pathological and, ultimately, evil element in human beings. > The struggle for autonomy heightens our aliveness. Insofar as the socialization process blocks autonomy, however, this process engenders the evil it attempts to prevent. If parental love is so distorted that it demands submission and dependence for its self-confirmation, social adjustment turns into a test of obedience and the child’s efforts to comply bring with them the loss of genuine feelings. The human being then becomes the true source of evil. -- Arno Gruen, "The Betrayal of the Self: The Fear of Autonomy in Men and Women"
RamshackleJ 8y ago
Illegal, unethical and immoral are all separate things. Its possible to be doing something legal and still be unethical or even immoral. Idk whats more disheartening, the censorship apologists in the comments or google shareholder/leadership willingness to be immoral in the pursuit of profit.
mobmobmob 8y ago
These US corporate elites are selling out US and the rest of the democratic free world in order to meet shareholder's expectations (and of course, MONEY!). And giving into a dictatorship and giving that dictatorship jobs, money, capital, knowledge, and power. That dictatorship now has imprisoned close to 1 million people in Xinjiang. Shame on you, Sundar Pichai. At least when Google was lead by Erich Schmidt, Google pulled out of China, and didn't bend to the whims of Chinese government. Shame on you, Tim Cook. Apple has 4.8 million jobs in China, more than double the jobs in US. https://247wallst.com/jobs/2017/03/17/apple-supports-4-8-mil.. https://247wallst.com/jobs/2017/03/17/apple-supports-4-8-mil.... . Shame on you for not bringing jobs back when news broke out that Foxconn has created a slave labor like working condition. Shame on you, Mark Zuckerberg, for continuing to appease the dictator in China, so that Facebook may gain a foothold there. Shame on you, Satya Nadella, for continuing to supply censored search results in Bing. and for not taking a stand against censorship. But I guess the microsoft borgship has a lot in common with China. Shame on you, Jeff Bezos. You become the richest man on earth, by allowing pirated, stolen, IP infriged goods from China to be sold on your platform without care, destroying small US businesses. You also partnered with Foxconn for Amazon Echo, tablet, and other hardwares. Amazon is a showcase for trade imbalance. disgusting.
- justicezyx 8y ago
  > That dictatorship now has imprisoned close to 1 million people in Xinjiang. Sources please? Xinjiang is not that big, they have 20mm people in total, 1mm will be fractional big enough to make the street appear more empty...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - astebbin 8y ago
    “The first thing you notice is the quiet. Then the white strips of paper stretched diagonally across the front doors of stores that look like they were vacated in a hurry. Once you get close enough, you can read the painted serial numbers on the house walls — WB-BUK 1 to 15 on one street — that tell you no one is coming back to these homes, and that many of those who lived there have been detained. Welcome to Xinjiang in China’s north west.” One of many such reports. https://www.ft.com/content/ac0ffb2e-8b36-11e8-b18d-0181731a0340 https://www.ft.com/content/ac0ffb2e-8b36-11e8-b18d-0181731a0...
Proven 8y ago
The uncensored one is also censoring the so called "fake news". You don't need to China to find Google's ethical violations - US-made censorship is great again.
rahimnathwani 8y ago
"It’s also one thing to respect local customs and laws, and another to actively implement them, as Google will be doing." I failed to understand what the author is trying to get at here. If there's a local law that means a company must collect sales tax from consumers, on behalf of he state, and remit the collected money to the state, then would the author consider that 'respecting' local laws, or 'actively implementing' them?
- cpeterso 8y ago
  I agree the article was unclear on that step. My reading was that Google could respect the local laws without actively implementing them by not doing business in China.
peterwwillis 8y ago
> Should large Western companies such as Google give up ethical values to make money in China? Google is a company that sells people's behavior and personal information to companies so that they can try to sell products to consumers, regardless of whether they need them or if it's the best choice for them. China is a country whose government seeks to repress all speech or action against its government. One of these seems a lot less ethical than the other to me. But both are born in and driven by the culture they were grown out of. Of course they're going to seem unethical from the perspective of a different culture.
eigenvector 8y ago
A common refrain that you will likely soon hear from Google executives and board members is that it's better to have access to a censored Google than no Google at all. The problem is that when Google took a stance against censorship, users behind the Great Firewall or other censorship regimes knew that if they managed to reach www.google.com through VPN or other means they were getting uncensored results. Now, no one will ever know whether they are seeing the 'real' Google or not. Google is one of the most advanced companies at geoblocking their services. You can't just hop on a VPN and access US-only Google services from, say, a French account. Google knows where you live, where you work, where you bank, who you're dating. This raises the spectre of Chinese censorship policies being applied even to queries coming from outside of the Great Firewall from accounts that have been deemed 'Chinese'. If you think 'they would never do that', just look at how quickly US business folded in the dispute with Beijing over acknowledging Taiwan as a country. Once you have business interests in China that can be held hostage, you're all in the way.
- cm2187 8y ago
  But where does censorship starts? Google already have to comply with local laws everywhere it operates. Is the right to be forgotten censorship? Is removing piratebay from the listing censorship? Or does it have to do with anything that offends a US liberal political stance? Then is Google’s mission really meant to be a propaganda tool for a particular political viewpoint?
  - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
    Political censorship that is supposed to keep current rulers in power by shielding them from criticism is categorically different from all other types of censorship. The difference is not gradual as you suggest, because political censorship works on a meta-level. It obstructs the democratic mechanism by which all other types of censorship can be debated and ultimately lifted. Opposing political censorship is not just another political viewpoint. It is a prerequisite to freely discussing and changing political viewpoints in the first place.
    - 8y ago
throwaway852 8y ago
One thing that really concerns me about Google operating in China and fully complying with their laws is what the effect will be on residents and citizens of Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan which are under a different legal system from the mainland but which the mainland claims authority over. Will our access to Google eventually be censored and will our data start flowing across the border to the central government?
- auslander 8y ago
  Why would it apply to Taiwan, sovereign country?
  - throwaway852 8y ago
    The same reason that airlines are now all renaming "Taiwan, sovereign country" to China. Google wants to be in China and they have proven today that they will do it at any costs.
mstaoru 8y ago
For once, I am on Google's side with this one. Somewhat of a discourse. In the last years, "China and Russia" became a new racist norm against anything and everything there. My mom and dad are absolutely against totalitarianism, but their "cardinal sin" is that they were born in Russia and they lack the financial means to move to another country. For years, they can't even buy any good cheese because the cheese was "sanctioned" as an import. Those imported goods that didn't disappear doubled and tripled in price. So whom did it hurt? I assure you that people in the government can buy any cheese they want. Back to Google and China. You can't find anything on Baidu or Sogou, it's so ridiculously bad that most of the knowledge in CNnet is concentrated within a few large systems: Wechat, Zhihu, Weibo. The idea of a "website" or a "blog" is almost unheard of, mostly because there will never be any exposure to this website or blog. Everything in China is on some kind of platforms. And as long as there are just a few big platforms, the government can control it all. Even now Google is a much better source of relevant information on the Chinese internet, and if it works in China officially, it will give regular Chinese people unprecedented flexibility and knowledge exchange. Okay, you won't be able to find Winnie the Pooh on Chinese Google, you won't be able to find Xinjiang concentration camps. But you will be able to find information about democracy, economy, physics, law, sociology, psychology, art, literature! It's equally important to let normal people of China access better information. China is incredibly high-tech and innovative, but the Chinese internet is extremely low-quality. Google is necessary here to provide the fertile soil on which thinkers can raise and start questioning their political status quo.
- seventhtiger 8y ago
  You're right. Here's food for thought: have sanctions ever resolved authoritarianism or dictatorship? Economic war should only be used to disable aggressive enemies, because it has never actually helped anyone better their human rights or political rights. In fact, among "passive" abusers of human rights we see that more contact with the rest of the world improves conditions.
  - buth_lika 8y ago
    Not partaking in evil IS the result. Any further ulitarian calculations are just rationalizations. You cannot predict the ultimate outcome of any course of action fully, but you can treat others like you want to be treated. If you wouldn't others to look the other way if you got disappeared, don't look the other way when people get disappeared. Period. Not because of how it affects world history, but because of how it affects you. It's not our job to "fix China". It's like some abusive alcoholic -- it's basically their problem, but if you go out drinking with them, and hold their beer when they kill random strangers, and then continue the conversation like nothing happened, you're helping making it worse, and are direct party to normalizing it. Companies don't have to pull out of China, they'd just have to speak up and never shut up, and China would kick them out. And maybe one day, when the hangover is particularly bad, there might be a hazy memory of an upright person saying "call me when you realized this isn't working". When people protested against Hitler, it was with slogans such as "murder isn't politics". Likewise, cooperation with murderers isn't business.
wangweij 8y ago
I'm with Google. Many years ago when Google created the censored search site in China, it was the first one that showed the sentence "According to local laws, some search results are removed". Before Google, no search engine showed this and people didn't even realize they were seeing censored search results. With a new censored search engine in China, Chinese users can access more accurate (and ethical) information than what they have now even if it has fewer results than google.com. This is not only about politics or democracy. In fact, even local players like Baidu will be forced to enhance their search results, which means their users (maybe forced to use it because it's the default one on their cellphones) can get better search results. I don't think Chinese users will be stupid enough to think the censored search results reflect what the real internet looks like. People know about VPN but often find it difficult to use. VPN providers are being closed down or even sued everyday. Apple's AppStore no longer provide VPN apps. Those who claim only VPN users deserve to use Google are evil. To me, the only bad thing is that the Chinese government will think they are "strong" enough to force a company like Google to obey them, but I think this is just a face gain for them but the ordinary internet users have much more benefits.
- bo1024 8y ago
  I agree there is a really big ethical difference if Google search shows that phrase or not. (Would that be part of their new censored engine?)

188 points by cpeterso 8y ago

It's really unfortunate that abiding by local laws and regulations is considered unethical. But even if we assume that there is no legal way for a company to operate ethically in China, is the world meant to close our borders to them entirely? 20% of the planet lives there and we do business with China every day when we buy something manufactured there, but do not feel morally required to boycott them on account of their government. Edit: to all the comments saying I equated lawful with ethical, please read my comment again. In particular the second sentence in which I clearly distinguish between the two.

snek 8y ago
Google Search provides information. Blocking access to information is, by the nature of the action, disenfranchising and oppressive. If Google were to re-enter the Chinese market, their Search product would either be controlled by the current government or they would be kicked out. I would argue that Google providing censored results is harmful to that 20%, so it is better to stay out.
- caibkai 8y ago
  Baidu has monopolized power in Chinese market as a search engine. It sold advertisement to fake hospital and ranked the advertisement as a top searching result. A young Chinese student died because of the fake hospital advertisement (Wei Zexi scandal). A censored google can still create more competition. How could it be harmful to that 20%?
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Because everyone knows that Baidu is government-controlled. So google.cn, even though many would know that it's also compromised, would basically be a honeypot. It would be far better for access to Google to remain dependent on VPN and Tor. And in that regard, it'd be very cool if Google didn't block Tor exits.
    - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
      Baidu is not government controlled, just submissive to it. Though it operates under the credo of “ask for forgiveness rather than permission” like almost every other Chinese tech company, so even that relationship is complicated.
      - reaperducer 8y ago
        Like a dog on a leash isn't controlled by its owner, it's just submissive to him? Riiiiiight. If Baidu was really doing anything independent, then it would get reined in, like the overseas Chinese real estate firms are. As for censorship: "According to the China Digital Times, Baidu has a long history of being the most active and restrictive online censor in the search arena. Documents leaked in April 2009 from an employee in Baidu's internal monitoring and censorship department show a long list of blocked websites and censored topics on Baidu search." I don't think Baidu came up with that list all by itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu#Censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu#Censorship
        seanmcdirmid 8y ago
        I don't think you really get how Chinese businesses operate. Tech businesses, as long as they are Chinese, operate under an assumption of semi-impunity as long as they don't cross political boundaries. So healthcare fraud is in bounds, and if they get caught, they'll just get a slap on the wrist. Its not like the government condones the fraud, more like they don't care as long as it doesn't result in social instability. Real estate firms and other industries like taxi groups are more likely to be directly controlled by princelings, so those are something else altogether. The government has a direct channel into these industries, because they are basically like a state-controlled mafia.
        mirimir 8y ago
        > Tech businesses, as long as they are Chinese, operate under an assumption of semi-impunity as long as they don't cross political boundaries. So healthcare fraud is in bounds, and if they get caught, they'll just get a slap on the wrist. Wait. So are you arguing that Chinese tech businesses are under state control, or that they aren't? Your examples point to a horrible compromise: political censorship with freedom to defraud the public.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    A censored google can still create more competition. A censored Google isn't more competition. It's just more of what already exists, with different branding.
ben_jones 8y ago
> It's really unfortunate that abiding by local laws and regulations is considered unethical. What about local laws in countries that are deeply homophobic? Is it unfortunate if countries don't hand over lists of gay users?
- amarkov 8y ago
  Certainly not. But is Google planning to hand over lists of users who search for banned terms? It seems like there's a big difference between handing over lists of users and restricting information.
  - xiii1408 8y ago
    They'll almost certainly hand over user data to the central government. They're required to partner with a Chinese firm, and this is a fairly common practice among Chinese technology companies.
  - Analemma_ 8y ago
    > But is Google planning to hand over lists of users who search for banned terms? Yes? That's so obvious I'm a little stunned you're even asking. If the government orders them to hand over that information, they won't have any choice.
  - kodablah 8y ago
    > It seems like there's a big difference between handing over lists of users and restricting information. I think what you're not understanding is it's not Google doing this vs that, it's Google doing what they are told, whatever that may be, or leaving.
rhcom2 8y ago
> It's really unfortunate that abiding by local laws and regulations is considered unethical. Laws anywhere are never a guarantee of ethics and not having Google help build part of a censored internet in China is not the same as closing our border to them entirely.
astebbin 8y ago
Local laws in East Berlin sanctioned the murder of Germans who sought to escape. Local laws in Vichy France required people to report hidden Jews to the police. Local laws in America under Jim Crow forbade interracial marriage, and denied Blacks their right to vote. Would you consider it unfortunate that some held these local laws to be unethical? I’d ascribe no more legitimacy to similar laws made by an unelected, authoritarian government with a history of kidnapping, torturing, and killing nonviolent dissidents. I’m privately amazed that the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights is now a subject of controversy. Why do we believe the Chinese Communist Party when it says, “China is special, and the Chinese people do not deserve basic human freedoms?”
- doombolt 8y ago
  "sanctioned the murder of Germans who sought to escape" I have read a page on capital punishment in Germany, found no such claims. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Germany https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_German...
  - astebbin 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Peter_Fechter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Peter_Fechter Many similar cases.
    - astebbin 8y ago
      I'd love to know why the parent has been downvoted. Further evidence, if any is needed: "The use of lethal force on the Berlin Wall was an integral part of the East German state's policy towards its border system." "The Stasi took charge of "corpse cases" and those injured while trying to cross the border, who were transported to hospitals run by the Stasi or the police where they would recuperate before being transferred to Stasi prisons. The Stasi also took sole responsibility for the disposal of the dead and their possessions. Bodies were not returned to relatives but were cremated, usually at the crematorium at Baumschulenweg. Occasionally the cost of the cremations was covered by the victims themselves using money taken from their pockets.[25] Stasi officers posing as policemen would inform the relatives, though not before trying to obtain "valuable pieces of information on the border violation". Deaths would be stated as being due to "a border provocation of his own causing", "a fatal accident of his own causing" or "drowning in a border waterway". Every border death was investigated in detail to identify how the attempt had been made, whether there were any vulnerabilities in the border system that needed to be remedied and whether anyone else had been involved. If necessary, the family, relatives, friends, colleagues and neighbours were put under surveillance." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deaths_at_the_Berlin_Wall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deaths_at_the_Berlin_W...
xiii1408 8y ago
No. It's not fair to justify building the machinery of a totalitarian state as simply "abiding by local laws and regulations." Not when the consequences involve clear violations of human rights. You don't have to look far to see how bad things have gotten recently in China, from abductions of booksellers in Hong Kong to an activist being carted away literally during a phone interview with Voice of America. When Western companies act like this is totally normal and even develop censorship technologies for regimes in countries with poor records for human rights, it lends false legitimacy to these unjust systems and even emboldens them to commit more serious violations of human rights.
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  Don't forget them placing 1 million Uyghurs (and counting) in "re-education camps" designed to destroy their culture and religion.
  - justinjlynn 8y ago
    You mean engaging in actions that meet the UN-accepted definition of genocide? May as well just call it genocide.
  - vkou 8y ago
    The last residential 'school' (which was aimed to do the same for First Nations people) in Canada closed in 1996, with little more then a hummm-hummm. Our shit stinks almost as much.
    - denorm 8y ago
      Whataboutism is a really poor argument. The history of the West is full of atrocities, but that doesn't somehow excuse the Chinese government from current human rights abuses. Nor does it mean that I as a Westerner do not have the right to criticize the Chinese government. In fact we have an obligation to condemn human rights abuses wherever they occur.
      - 8y ago
Sangermaine 8y ago
>It's really unfortunate that abiding by local laws and regulations is considered unethical. What a disgusting comment. What is legal and what is ethical are not the same thing at all. I have difficulty believing this was written in good faith.
- throwaway8879 8y ago
  And what is ethical exactly? Objectively? And this is something that you get to decide? Maximizing profits seems pretty ethical to me.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    It's something that everybody gets to decide for themselves. And then judge others accordingly.
  - mmirate 8y ago
    Ethics are inherently subjective, which is why their only actual usefulness is as a shorthand/proxy for "unlikelihood to generate bad press".
  - buth_lika 8y ago
    How come others have to have "objective" morals, but for you "seems to me" is perfectly fine? Of course it's subjective, that doesn't take away from it at all, since any opinion that it being subjective is a problem is subjective as well. > Maximizing profits seems pretty ethical to me. Up to extracting gold teeth from people murdered in concentration camps, or is there a limit for you? > [Q: Isn't there a certain calculus that someone who is sitting in the shoes of a Condoleezza Rice can make, that they're responsible for the best outcome for American citizens, and there's an upside of going into Iraq which is we get one of the greatest material possessions in world's history, and there're downsides which are: we upset the international community, and maybe there's more terrorism. Couldn't you envision a calculus where they say, sure, that's the reason, and it's a good reason, let's do it. What's the flaw in the calculus?] > Oh, I think that's exactly their calculus. But then we ought to just be honest and say, "Look, we're a bunch of Nazis." So fine, let's just drop all the discussion, we save a lot of trees, we can throw out the newspapers and most of the scholarly literature, and just come out, state it straight, and tell the truth: we'll do whatever we want because we think we're gonna gain by it. And incidently, it's not American citizens who'll gain. They don't gain by this. It's narrow sectors of domestic power that the administration is serving with quite unusual dedication... -- Noam Chomsky, Talk titled "Why Iraq?" at Harvard University, November 4, 2002
lx3459683 8y ago
> It's really unfortunate that abiding by local laws and regulations is considered unethical. Ethical and legal are two entirely different concepts. What's really unfortunate is there's a significant number of people who haven't been able to break out of their indoctrination to equate these things and to follow laws without questioning them or assessing the ethics involved. The overwhelming majority of laws is written by the rich and powerful to represent their interests, which are entirely divorced from ethics. It is the ethical responsibility of every individual to refuse to abide by those laws and act to change them. We can't pretend that your kind of viewpoint is acceptable. We have had too many historical examples of people committing some of the worst atrocities of all time while abiding by the laws of the time and 'just following orders'. I'm upvoting you so we can keep this terrifying sentiment at the top of the thread for all to see and discuss.
ataturk 8y ago
We don't have to close them off entirely, but we do have to acknowledge the problem in our faces. Google would be happy to apply the censorship worldwide, not just in China! If Western culture isn't dead, if our Western legal traditions mean anything at all (I'm talking about individual rights here) then we have to fight the good fight for ourselves and on behalf of those who can't. Otherwise we'll succumb to the least common denominator because technocrats simply don't care. I'll tell you the truth--I don' think the new generation in SV has any understanding of history whatsoever. I think they believe they are the most brilliant, infallible people in the world. So I don't have a great outlook on what our future holds because it's always like this when a generation arrogantly forgets the past and thinks that nothing bad can ever happen. SV is almost 100% Democrats, coincidence?
Leary 8y ago
Google's situation is similar to many American authors' experience when confronted with the choice of 1) not publishing in China. and 2) publishing a censored version of their book. The decision is not an easy one, even for those who support freedom of information. Those who deem Google's actions unethical often fail to realize that without Google or foreign books, Chinese internet users and readers will have less access to information. Peter Hessler, an American writer detailed such the discussion of censorship in the West https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/09/travels-with-my-censor https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/09/travels-with-m... "Western commentary about censorship often turns inward, portraying limitations in other countries in a way that celebrates our own values. One of the most striking qualities of foreign portrayals of censorship in China is the apparent lack of interest in Chinese readers and editors. "
- int_19h 8y ago
  There is a very simple and clear line, actually. The moment you have to write a single line of code to specifically enable political censorship, you're complicit in it. Such as in this case, where they're not just talking about e.g. taking down links in search results when asked, but inserting new code into the entire Android software stack, or even writing new apps outright, to enable such censorship. And yes, of course it celebrates our own values. Why should we use any other values to judge our companies? If they don't want to be subject to this, they can always split their Chinese branch away entirely, and let it be run by the locals. Then it would be a Chinese internal matter. But when software engineers in California are implementing censorship for Chinese government, they're going to be criticized by the standards that apply in California.
  - dcbadacd 8y ago
    > but inserting new code into the entire Android software stack, or even writing new apps outright, to enable such censorship. Let's not forget Apple already has done this with iOS. It's just worth mentioning that this isn't Google-specific.
- qudat 8y ago
  > portraying limitations in other countries in a way that celebrates our own values. This rings very true to me. Like others have commented in this thread, google is unethical because "they are disrupting the foundations of democracy by abiding by totalitarian rules" as if democracy is the one True form of governance.
chillacy 8y ago
Sounds like there's a parallel with boycotts of Apartheid South Africa? Anyways I think the best answer for society to the general question of "if there's no legal way for a company to operate ethically, should it not?" is a resounding yes. However game theory will ensure that in absence of external pressure (via regulation or public sentiment), companies will try to serve the market for profit.
est 8y ago
> It's really unfortunate that abiding by local laws and regulations is considered unethical No, it's that speaking up against local "laws" and quit, then come back again that's unethical.
denorm 8y ago
"Abiding by local laws and regulations" is a veil behind which international companies hide, claiming lack of responsibility for actions that many of us would consider unethical. Just as with Yahoo's outing of Chinese dissidents[0], at some point companies in China (like Apple, now hosting iCloud data in Guizhou) are going to be forced to hand over data to the Chinese government in order to "abide by local laws". Cue the "but the NSA collects all our data, anyway" arguments.. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Yahoo!#Outing_of_Chinese_dissidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Yahoo!#Outing_of_...
buth_lika 8y ago
> It's really unfortunate that abiding by local laws and regulations is considered unethical. It seems unfortunate to you, because you are not aware of the thought and research that went into this insight, and the roughly 100 million dead people.
- dang 8y ago
  We've banned this account for continuing to use HN primarily for ideological warfare despite many requests to stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

drivingmenuts 8y ago

Are there Chinese citizens who are members of the ACM who also work for their government? If so, how does that square?

loukrazy 8y ago

If Google employees are pushing back projects with the US govt I can’t imagine this will sit well at all

ronnier 8y ago
My guess is, it’ll sit just fine with them and we won’t see any push back.
- codeka 8y ago
  What makes you say that? See, eg https://theintercept.com/2018/08/03/google-search-engine-china-censorship-backlash/ https://theintercept.com/2018/08/03/google-search-engine-chi...
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    Maybe because, according to your link, hundreds of people inside Google knew about this for over a year and said nothing? It's one thing for a plan like this to be secret among a bunch of C-levels in a boardroom for a week. It's something else when HUNDREDS of people are involved, and a product is ready to deploy. That indicates a cultural problem within the company. More evidence of that (again from your link): "Company managers responded by swiftly trying to shut down employees’ access to any documents that contained information about the China censorship project, according to Google insiders who witnessed the backlash."
  - zaarn 8y ago
    In another thread about this I asked a Googler, who was outraged of being accussed to have done nothing about it or planning to do nothing about, what they planned to do and there was no response at all. Googlers don't care, they get to have Google on their resume!

claydavisss 8y ago

Yet you all cheer when the SPLC implements thoughtcrime right here in the "land of the free". I hate to indulge the cliche "snowflake", but the notions you all have of what should and shouldn't be on the web is increasingly looking like what your professor told you to think. Or do only white Americans get to decide what is "hate speech"? Why won't you respect what other cultures determine "hateful"? You certainly expect them to accept your notions...

AntiGameZ 8y ago

Some people at China desperately want to access Google for a better search experience. Is a 80% percent of Google better than no Google at all for Chinese people? If people is dying and you have the cure with a little bit stains, is the ethical violated if you save people with a imperfect way or just let the pantient to die is a better option?

throwaway484722 8y ago
No, because currently they’re forced to use a VPN and see the full thing, which is what most people do because results are way better than Baidu (even in 中文).
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Nasrudith 8y ago
It is akin to embargo ethics essentially. Technically buying coal from North Korea can help feed the people but by supporting their government you help prolong their power and thus lead to more suffering. It is ethically messy on the right side even. Similarly by not giving them access to what they know the rest of the world has you breed discontent with the current way of doing things. The culture and thus indirect demand flows regardless of what they do like rock music into the USSR. It also isn't an absolute denial - google would gladly step back into China with no ethical qualms if they abandoned their censorship policies. Their government would find it unthinkable however.

aaron695 8y ago

Google first censored in I think France at least 10 years ago ( and still does ) so stop the hypocrisy and clean up our backyard first. Defend Alex Jones etc or go home.

intralizee 8y ago

I'm happy I never put in the hours studying algorithms to work at Google. Whatever happened to following their slogan?

gcb0 8y ago
Money. And people are loving it. I doubt anybody will ask who designed this immoral plan on the next investor meeting. If they ask, it will be for praises.
Nasrudith 8y ago
Public shareholders and their destructive unrealistic expectations. They expect to see growth continue regardless of the size of the company when risk/stability and rate of growth are in an inverse relationship equilibrium (low risk-high returns eventually leads to more investment which leads to diminished returns, high risk leads to less investment which means better margins from lack of competition if the risk pays off). They have proven downright allergic to long-term planning in favor of the short term.

miguelrochefort 8y ago

What's the difference between Google adopting Chinese regulations in China and Google adopting GDPR regulations in Europe?

dsr_ 8y ago
When a company does something good for human rights and civilization, we say "Good." When they do something bad for human rights and civilization, we say "Bad." What's the deal with pretending that laws are ethically neutral?
- miguelrochefort 8y ago
  Is Google doing something bad for human rights and civilization?
kerng 8y ago
I'm not sure if that is a serious question or just a sarcastic comment?
kodablah 8y ago
I'm anti-GDPR and even I see that as a poor equivalence. The difference? Morality, so maybe to you there's no difference but to others it's obvious. The implementation difference, EU hasn't started large-scale blocking of sites that violate its laws (yet).
- miguelrochefort 8y ago
  China does what it thinks is best for itself. The compromise is crippling of free speech. I don't like that. Europe does what it thinks is best for itself. The compromise is crippling of innovation. I don't like that. Are they doing the right thing? I don't think so. Is it legitimate for them to do so? Probably. Personally, I believe the best solution is to break the rule. Ignore all regulations (hate speech, GDPR, copyrights, patents, net neutrality, China's firewall) and make it easy for people to do the same thing. They won't be able to enforce their unreasonable regulations, and they'll have to repeal them. That's what I intend to do.

ansy 8y ago

At the risk of sounding nationalistic, I think companies in the United States and other democratic countries should reconsider any and all business relationships with authoritarian regimes like those in China and Russia. And I say regimes because most "companies" in these countries are really just instruments of the state. There may be money to be made, but not only are companies like Google tightening these authoritarian regimes' grips on millions and billions of people, but they are undermining the foundations of democracy by strengthening those who choose to crush it in their own countries. I have no business of my own to withdraw from China or Russia. But if I did, I would look to send my investments to Taiwain, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand instead.

smallnamespace 8y ago
> I have no business of my own to withdraw from China or Russia. That's probably untrue from the face of it, just from the amount of products and goods that are produced in whole or in part in China. In fact, for many products, good luck finding a choice that doesn't directly or indirectly lead to money ending up in the coffers of the Chinese businesses, which is just one hop away from tax revenues of the Chinese state. But, like, everyone also directly buys or depends on gasoline, which indirectly funds plenty of unpleasantly authoritarian regimes. What I'm curious is how anyone can have clean hands when everything is just shades of grey in a global, fully-connected economy where everyone is just a few hops from everyone else.
- klodolph 8y ago
  > That's probably untrue from the face of it, just from the amount of products and goods that are produced in whole or in part in China. That’s the same way that clothing brands deal with the problem of having their products made in sweat shops. Brand X makes their clothes in sweat shops, there’s an exposé, brand X does an investigation, finds that contractor Y hired subcontractor Z without the right controls in place, and then fires subcontractor Z. But subcontractor Z was just doing business with the actual sweatshop W, and after subcontractor Z is fired, contractor Y hires a new subcontractor Z', which then later rehires W because they’re the cheapest (after the media attention cools down). Round and round it goes. Because there’s such a large chain, from brand X to contractor Y to subcontractor Z and finally sweat shop W, brand X has very weak and indirect control over the conditions in sweat shop W. This is by design, and it’s encouraged by the way our legal system works. Each link is an isolated domain with limited liability, than can be destroyed and replaced separately from the rest. On top of that, jurisdictional issues prevent the arm of the law from effectively addressing sweat shop W from the country where brand X exists, especially since contractors Y and Z might also be in completely separate countries. The economic pressure to be the cheapest encourages people to take ethical and legal shortcuts, to keep plausible deniability you make the supply chain long enough, and then whenever it blows up the blast radius is only as large as a single, replaceable link in the chain. And so we get back to the idea that you can simply satisfy yourself by not personally doing business with China or Russia. The entire system is set up to pander to people who want to do things “ethically” by hiding all of the unethical behavior far away at the other end of the supply chain. You can pat yourself on the back for not buying Kathy Lee Gifford or Nike, but you turn around and buy clothing at prices so low they can only be reliably sourced from workshops with the same terrible conditions. I’m not arguing that the alternative is to turn a blind eye, but I don’t think outrage at individual companies that do business with the wrong countries is a meaningful choice that we can make. I’m not talking about companies like Nestlé, yes, let’s be plenty pissed off at Nestlé. But if we’re going to change this, the reach of the law should be longer. If brand X were liable for conditions in sweatshop W, financially, then that kind of hazard would be priced into all of the contracts all the way down the chain. This is called “extraterritorial jurisdiction” and it has precedent, like Australia’s Crimes (Child Sex Tourism) Amendment Act 1994.

628C6l0 8y ago

Honestly, the censored stuff is crap anyways. Reading the censored stuff is what leads people to devote their lives to "politics", "activism", and "social justice", and away from the really good stuff such as math, science, and philosophy, which the Chinese government never blocked. Any time spent on the activism stuff is time you are not spending on genuinely meaningful and personally fulfilling pursuits. In a sense, political activity is like playing video games and doing drugs, except more dangerous because you don't tend to feel as guilty for spending a lot of time on it. I think it's a good thing that drugs are generally banned, but there are also such things as "drugs of the mind" such as video games and political agitations and I don't see why reasons for banning the former shouldn't generalize to at least some of the latter

buttholesurfer 8y ago
Wow.
crazygringo 8y ago
This is perhaps the greatest example of Poe's Law I've ever seen... I... hope? Otherwise, I genuinely don't even know where to begin...
buth_lika 8y ago
Here's a book tip. > The type of personal integration we attain – or the effective lack thereof – depends on what possibilities our life situation offers us for the development of autonomy. It is a distorted development that is the root cause of the pathological and, ultimately, evil element in human beings. > The struggle for autonomy heightens our aliveness. Insofar as the socialization process blocks autonomy, however, this process engenders the evil it attempts to prevent. If parental love is so distorted that it demands submission and dependence for its self-confirmation, social adjustment turns into a test of obedience and the child’s efforts to comply bring with them the loss of genuine feelings. The human being then becomes the true source of evil. -- Arno Gruen, "The Betrayal of the Self: The Fear of Autonomy in Men and Women"

RamshackleJ 8y ago

Illegal, unethical and immoral are all separate things. Its possible to be doing something legal and still be unethical or even immoral. Idk whats more disheartening, the censorship apologists in the comments or google shareholder/leadership willingness to be immoral in the pursuit of profit.

mobmobmob 8y ago

These US corporate elites are selling out US and the rest of the democratic free world in order to meet shareholder's expectations (and of course, MONEY!). And giving into a dictatorship and giving that dictatorship jobs, money, capital, knowledge, and power. That dictatorship now has imprisoned close to 1 million people in Xinjiang. Shame on you, Sundar Pichai. At least when Google was lead by Erich Schmidt, Google pulled out of China, and didn't bend to the whims of Chinese government. Shame on you, Tim Cook. Apple has 4.8 million jobs in China, more than double the jobs in US. https://247wallst.com/jobs/2017/03/17/apple-supports-4-8-mil.. https://247wallst.com/jobs/2017/03/17/apple-supports-4-8-mil.... . Shame on you for not bringing jobs back when news broke out that Foxconn has created a slave labor like working condition. Shame on you, Mark Zuckerberg, for continuing to appease the dictator in China, so that Facebook may gain a foothold there. Shame on you, Satya Nadella, for continuing to supply censored search results in Bing. and for not taking a stand against censorship. But I guess the microsoft borgship has a lot in common with China. Shame on you, Jeff Bezos. You become the richest man on earth, by allowing pirated, stolen, IP infriged goods from China to be sold on your platform without care, destroying small US businesses. You also partnered with Foxconn for Amazon Echo, tablet, and other hardwares. Amazon is a showcase for trade imbalance. disgusting.

justicezyx 8y ago
> That dictatorship now has imprisoned close to 1 million people in Xinjiang. Sources please? Xinjiang is not that big, they have 20mm people in total, 1mm will be fractional big enough to make the street appear more empty...
- deleted 8y ago
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- astebbin 8y ago
  “The first thing you notice is the quiet. Then the white strips of paper stretched diagonally across the front doors of stores that look like they were vacated in a hurry. Once you get close enough, you can read the painted serial numbers on the house walls — WB-BUK 1 to 15 on one street — that tell you no one is coming back to these homes, and that many of those who lived there have been detained. Welcome to Xinjiang in China’s north west.” One of many such reports. https://www.ft.com/content/ac0ffb2e-8b36-11e8-b18d-0181731a0340 https://www.ft.com/content/ac0ffb2e-8b36-11e8-b18d-0181731a0...

Proven 8y ago

The uncensored one is also censoring the so called "fake news". You don't need to China to find Google's ethical violations - US-made censorship is great again.

rahimnathwani 8y ago

"It’s also one thing to respect local customs and laws, and another to actively implement them, as Google will be doing." I failed to understand what the author is trying to get at here. If there's a local law that means a company must collect sales tax from consumers, on behalf of he state, and remit the collected money to the state, then would the author consider that 'respecting' local laws, or 'actively implementing' them?

cpeterso 8y ago
I agree the article was unclear on that step. My reading was that Google could respect the local laws without actively implementing them by not doing business in China.

peterwwillis 8y ago

> Should large Western companies such as Google give up ethical values to make money in China? Google is a company that sells people's behavior and personal information to companies so that they can try to sell products to consumers, regardless of whether they need them or if it's the best choice for them. China is a country whose government seeks to repress all speech or action against its government. One of these seems a lot less ethical than the other to me. But both are born in and driven by the culture they were grown out of. Of course they're going to seem unethical from the perspective of a different culture.

eigenvector 8y ago

A common refrain that you will likely soon hear from Google executives and board members is that it's better to have access to a censored Google than no Google at all. The problem is that when Google took a stance against censorship, users behind the Great Firewall or other censorship regimes knew that if they managed to reach www.google.com through VPN or other means they were getting uncensored results. Now, no one will ever know whether they are seeing the 'real' Google or not. Google is one of the most advanced companies at geoblocking their services. You can't just hop on a VPN and access US-only Google services from, say, a French account. Google knows where you live, where you work, where you bank, who you're dating. This raises the spectre of Chinese censorship policies being applied even to queries coming from outside of the Great Firewall from accounts that have been deemed 'Chinese'. If you think 'they would never do that', just look at how quickly US business folded in the dispute with Beijing over acknowledging Taiwan as a country. Once you have business interests in China that can be held hostage, you're all in the way.

cm2187 8y ago
But where does censorship starts? Google already have to comply with local laws everywhere it operates. Is the right to be forgotten censorship? Is removing piratebay from the listing censorship? Or does it have to do with anything that offends a US liberal political stance? Then is Google’s mission really meant to be a propaganda tool for a particular political viewpoint?
- fauigerzigerk 8y ago
  Political censorship that is supposed to keep current rulers in power by shielding them from criticism is categorically different from all other types of censorship. The difference is not gradual as you suggest, because political censorship works on a meta-level. It obstructs the democratic mechanism by which all other types of censorship can be debated and ultimately lifted. Opposing political censorship is not just another political viewpoint. It is a prerequisite to freely discussing and changing political viewpoints in the first place.
  - 8y ago

throwaway852 8y ago

One thing that really concerns me about Google operating in China and fully complying with their laws is what the effect will be on residents and citizens of Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan which are under a different legal system from the mainland but which the mainland claims authority over. Will our access to Google eventually be censored and will our data start flowing across the border to the central government?

auslander 8y ago
Why would it apply to Taiwan, sovereign country?
- throwaway852 8y ago
  The same reason that airlines are now all renaming "Taiwan, sovereign country" to China. Google wants to be in China and they have proven today that they will do it at any costs.

mstaoru 8y ago

For once, I am on Google's side with this one. Somewhat of a discourse. In the last years, "China and Russia" became a new racist norm against anything and everything there. My mom and dad are absolutely against totalitarianism, but their "cardinal sin" is that they were born in Russia and they lack the financial means to move to another country. For years, they can't even buy any good cheese because the cheese was "sanctioned" as an import. Those imported goods that didn't disappear doubled and tripled in price. So whom did it hurt? I assure you that people in the government can buy any cheese they want. Back to Google and China. You can't find anything on Baidu or Sogou, it's so ridiculously bad that most of the knowledge in CNnet is concentrated within a few large systems: Wechat, Zhihu, Weibo. The idea of a "website" or a "blog" is almost unheard of, mostly because there will never be any exposure to this website or blog. Everything in China is on some kind of platforms. And as long as there are just a few big platforms, the government can control it all. Even now Google is a much better source of relevant information on the Chinese internet, and if it works in China officially, it will give regular Chinese people unprecedented flexibility and knowledge exchange. Okay, you won't be able to find Winnie the Pooh on Chinese Google, you won't be able to find Xinjiang concentration camps. But you will be able to find information about democracy, economy, physics, law, sociology, psychology, art, literature! It's equally important to let normal people of China access better information. China is incredibly high-tech and innovative, but the Chinese internet is extremely low-quality. Google is necessary here to provide the fertile soil on which thinkers can raise and start questioning their political status quo.

seventhtiger 8y ago
You're right. Here's food for thought: have sanctions ever resolved authoritarianism or dictatorship? Economic war should only be used to disable aggressive enemies, because it has never actually helped anyone better their human rights or political rights. In fact, among "passive" abusers of human rights we see that more contact with the rest of the world improves conditions.
- buth_lika 8y ago
  Not partaking in evil IS the result. Any further ulitarian calculations are just rationalizations. You cannot predict the ultimate outcome of any course of action fully, but you can treat others like you want to be treated. If you wouldn't others to look the other way if you got disappeared, don't look the other way when people get disappeared. Period. Not because of how it affects world history, but because of how it affects you. It's not our job to "fix China". It's like some abusive alcoholic -- it's basically their problem, but if you go out drinking with them, and hold their beer when they kill random strangers, and then continue the conversation like nothing happened, you're helping making it worse, and are direct party to normalizing it. Companies don't have to pull out of China, they'd just have to speak up and never shut up, and China would kick them out. And maybe one day, when the hangover is particularly bad, there might be a hazy memory of an upright person saying "call me when you realized this isn't working". When people protested against Hitler, it was with slogans such as "murder isn't politics". Likewise, cooperation with murderers isn't business.

wangweij 8y ago

I'm with Google. Many years ago when Google created the censored search site in China, it was the first one that showed the sentence "According to local laws, some search results are removed". Before Google, no search engine showed this and people didn't even realize they were seeing censored search results. With a new censored search engine in China, Chinese users can access more accurate (and ethical) information than what they have now even if it has fewer results than google.com. This is not only about politics or democracy. In fact, even local players like Baidu will be forced to enhance their search results, which means their users (maybe forced to use it because it's the default one on their cellphones) can get better search results. I don't think Chinese users will be stupid enough to think the censored search results reflect what the real internet looks like. People know about VPN but often find it difficult to use. VPN providers are being closed down or even sued everyday. Apple's AppStore no longer provide VPN apps. Those who claim only VPN users deserve to use Google are evil. To me, the only bad thing is that the Chinese government will think they are "strong" enough to force a company like Google to obey them, but I think this is just a face gain for them but the ordinary internet users have much more benefits.

bo1024 8y ago
I agree there is a really big ethical difference if Google search shows that phrase or not. (Would that be part of their new censored engine?)