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Google Employees Protest Work on Censored Search Engine for China
- wemdyjreichert 8y agoGlad they're protesting something actually bad this time (unlike US military tech)
- okreallywtf 8y agoWhat are you referring to exactly?
- V-eHGsd_ 8y agoI think he/she is suggesting that project maven wasn't as bad as people made it out to be. It's unclear from the lack of context _why_ they think that.
- BlackjackCF 8y agoGoogle employees were protesting the company's involvement in making drones for the Pentagon: https://gizmodo.com/thousands-of-google-employees-protest-companys-involvem-1824988565 https://gizmodo.com/thousands-of-google-employees-protest-co...
- RightMillennial 8y agoThere was a protest or something by some Google employees a few months ago about contracts with the Pentagon: Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17064776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17064776
- prolikewh0a 8y ago>unlike US military tech You realize that US Military Tech goes into killing innocent people literally all the time, right?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- maimeowmeow 8y agowithout us military tech you wouldnt even be able to post said nitpickings. Such tech developed, isnt intended to kill innocents, just like the inevitable future deaths of self driving cars are not.
- drak0n1c 8y agoImproved US Military Tech (sensors, communications, precision) can translate into less collateral damage in operations. These ops have been conducted under every president and will continue happening under future presidents, unless we go full isolationist. The issue isn't black and white.
- amaccuish 8y agoSo US = good, China = bad? Too simplistic.
- ethicsengineer 8y agoDemocracy with personal freedoms = good Repressive dictatorship that regularly jails political dissidents = bad
- parthdesai 8y agoDemocracy with personal freedom while invading foreign nations and killing innocent civilians in the process == good?
- ethicsengineer 8y agoThere are many things that the US does that are bad. I can't think of one thing the PRC government does that is good.
- parthdesai 8y agoright, and i countering your first sentence. Not everything has to be binary. One can be bad and other can be worst.
- privacypoller 8y agoExcept good and bad are relative, not absolute. In your case you seem to be comparing to a personal notion of "good", but it's still relative. You also state that "not everything has to be binary" and then say something can be "worst", which is the same absolute you seem to be arguing against
- hatergonnahate 8y agoHow about the PRC government managed to feed most of its 1.3B people and not export absurd amount of poverty?
- knuththetruth 8y agoI hope that between this and the defeat of Project Maven, Google employees are waking up to how much power they have when act collectively. Hopefully, more formal labor organization follows, so there can be an ongoing check on the poor, executive-level decision-making that keeps pushing the company into these unethical pursuits.
- prolikewh0a 8y agoNot sure why you're being downvoted. This seems like an extremely reasonable statement to me. Ethics seem to not really be valued in many large tech companies anymore, as long as employee's can make large sums of money.
- plainOldText 8y agoI’ll tell you why: because the op suggested labor unions. They are considered harmful because it’s switching to a centralized decision making process. Perhaps unions were beneficial in the past for workers with little to no education, but for the “highly educated” software engineers living in an age where information is easily available, maybe not so much.
- knuththetruth 8y agoHow are unions a centralized decision-making process relative to companies that are ran like dictatorships by unelected executives? If anything, labor organization decentralizes decision-making and power within a company.
- plainOldText 8y agoFor one labor unions represent people across all companies, whereas without it, one can deal/negotiate directly with companies individually. Also, nothing is preventing one from founding a startup which elects its leaders democratically.
- 8y ago
- to_bpr 8y agoIt's funny that it's only now that Google employees are developing a conscience. Advanced facial recognition systems, email harvesting, stalking people across the internet and monitoring their every keyboard press, many more drastic infringements on people's privacy under the guise of "they clicked accept on our 1000 page t&cs"...not a whimper. I support anything that damages Google as an entity, or throws egg on the faces of those who choose to work for them, so this apparent revolution-of-conscience from within is pretty delightful to behold.
- cphoover 8y agoYa know there is more than one person that works at Google. Likely many/most of them have differing perspectives.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago> It's funny that it's only now that Google employees are developing a conscience. Advanced facial recognition systems, email harvesting, stalking people across the internet and monitoring their every keyboard press, many more drastic infringements on people's privacy under the guise of "they clicked accept on our 1000 page t&cs"...not a whimper. The difference is, things you listed have clear good/useful applications beyond the obvious problems, and employees may be less inclined to protest if they believe the company is working in good faith. In contrast, both the China situation and project Maven seem much more directly problematic.
- lern_too_spel 8y ago> Advanced facial recognition systems, email harvesting, stalking people across the internet and monitoring their every keyboard press These things have clear benefit to the user (face unlock and personal photo search, personal email search, search ranking, instant search). Adding yet another censored search engine in China does not.
- dang 8y agoYou've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's an abuse of this site, and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of which politics they're blessing or smiting. The reason is that HN exists for intellectual curiosity, and these two phenomena don't go well together. Indeed, one destroys the other. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended in the future, we'd appreciate it.
- HuckFackerNews 8y agoThe guy who bought Milo Yiannopoulos 20,000 Twitter followers at the beginning of GamerGate predicted this entire scenario: https://archive.fo/bRI7h#selection-567.0-573.417 https://archive.fo/bRI7h#selection-567.0-573.417 > Silicon Valley work forces are made mostly of first-generations from other cultures that are mostly not progressive in the Western sense. China, Korea, and Vietnam spent the last half of the 20th century either running from or killing communists. Some have had family involved. These potential Silicon Valley defectors, especially from Google, are fucking gold mines. Devs always keep a copy of code/db dumps. As the defectors pile up, they will bring more and more evidence of cyber phrenology. Silicon Valley will have its Snowden moment. > As these efforts go into full swing and the defectors pile up, Silicon Valley will have to institute Scientology-style restrictions of expression and behavior. These limitations will only create more defectors as internal reprimands become more reactionary. If you need help finding the psychology of Silicon Valley developers, mine HackerNews and IRC logs for sentiment analysis about their behaviors and allegiances. He even said he was going "make Google censor protected classes.": https://twitter.com/emblem21CEO/status/919673752480235520 https://twitter.com/emblem21CEO/status/919673752480235520
- staunch 8y agoIt's interesting that this free exchange of ideas, and group dissent, inside of Google is exactly the power that the Chinese people lack over their own government. It really shows why the Chinese government is so afraid of it. And why it's so necessary as a tool for maintaining the ethics of a massive organization.
- drb91 8y agoWe’ll see if the free exchange ideas results in an ethic that reflects the people who built google.
- vackosar 8y agoMaybe Google has some plan how to actually undermine the censorship long term, but it seems that it must be quite a long shot.
- privacypoller 8y agoIt's seems highly unlikely that this is some long game by Google where they're going to "bring down the man from the inside"
- tivert 8y ago> Maybe Google has some plan how to actually undermine the censorship long term, but it seems that it must be quite a long shot. There's no such plan. The Communist Party will kick them out faster than you can say "great firewall" if they took any action to undermine their censorship regime.
- NuckFackerHews 8y agoSo... the guy who bought Milo Yiannopoulos 20,000 Twitter followers at the beginning of GamerGate predicted this entire scenario: https://archive.fo/bRI7h#selection-567.0-573.417 https://archive.fo/bRI7h#selection-567.0-573.417 > Silicon Valley work forces are made mostly of first-generations from other cultures that are mostly not progressive in the Western sense. China, Korea, and Vietnam spent the last half of the 20th century either running from or killing communists. Some have had family involved. These potential Silicon Valley defectors, especially from Google, are fucking gold mines. Devs always keep a copy of code/db dumps. As the defectors pile up, they will bring more and more evidence of cyber phrenology. Silicon Valley will have its Snowden moment. > As these efforts go into full swing and the defectors pile up, Silicon Valley will have to institute Scientology-style restrictions of expression and behavior. These limitations will only create more defectors as internal reprimands become more reactionary. If you need help finding the psychology of Silicon Valley developers, mine HackerNews and IRC logs for sentiment analysis about their behaviors and allegiances. He even said he was going "make Google censor protected classes.": https://twitter.com/emblem21CEO/status/919673752480235520 https://twitter.com/emblem21CEO/status/919673752480235520
- drb91 8y agoSilicon Valley needs to get into labor agitation if these protests are gonna go anywhere.
- bargl 8y agoWouldn't software engineers need to unionize to do that effectively? I'm asking from knowledge 0 about unions etc. So how would that work?
- knuththetruth 8y agoYes, they would need to organize, but what’s happening at Google is a nascent form of this kind of struggle. Before there were ever such things as unions, workers banned together and rebelled in precisely the way employees at Google are doing so now. Over time, they recognized the need to create a formal, more durable structure, which culminated in what we today think of as unions. In terms of the practical realities of organizing developers, check out Tech Solidarity or your local DSA branch. Both groups are deeply involved with helping workers organize and restore a sane power balance to the American economy. https://techsolidarity.org/ https://techsolidarity.org/ https://www.dsausa.org/ https://www.dsausa.org/
- drb91 8y agoYes, unionization is key here. Cultural tastes need to change a bit, I think, but developers have enormous leverage. I’d like to echo the sibling comment to visit your local DSA branch if you want more information.
- zzzcpan 8y agoOrganization - maybe, unionization is not. It might even shift this kind of power away from the developers with all the unethical stuff easily traded for perks and better compensation.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- 394549 8y ago> The letter is circulating on Google’s internal communication systems and is signed by about 1,000 employees, according to two people familiar with the document, who were not authorized to speak publicly. > ... > The internal debate over Maven, viewed by both supporters and opponents as opening the door to much bigger defense contracts, generated a petition signed by about 4,000 employees who demanded “a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology.” Are signatures still being collected on the China letter? That count is quite a bit less than letter protesting Project Maven. In my mind, trying to enter the Chinese market is far more concerning than Project Maven. The Chinese government has shown ample willingness to use its economic leverage to force foreign companies to adopt its stances (for instance http://time.com/5348666/airlines-websites-taiwan-china/ http://time.com/5348666/airlines-websites-taiwan-china/), and subjecting Google, our main portal to the internet to that pressure is just too risky.
- pc86 8y agoLet's not forget that there are over 85,000 Google employees. And it's news that 1,000 of them signed a letter? If you get 85,000 people together you can get 850 of them to agree to just about anything.
- clay_the_ripper 8y agoLarge movements start small. In order to become a larger movement, first it needs a small movement.
- pc86 8y agoI'm not disputing that, and that's a pretty odd assumption to make. I'm simply saying that if 10% of Google employees had signed this, it might be news. Barely 1% doesn't seem particularly newsworthy.
- xiii1408 8y agoIt's gotten even worse than airlines: they pressured 85C, the Taiwanese Bakery, into espousing a one China policy: https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/08/16/taiwans-85c-bakery-cafe-bows-china-boycott-threat/ https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/08/16/taiwans-85c-bakery-caf.... It's remarkable to me that the "feelings of 1.3 billion people" are so fragile that they're unable to enjoy their coffee cake if the company that made it doesn't kowtow to Beijing.
- econ4all 8y agoGoogle's pullout of China in the first place was their biggest corporate mistake and they should at least try to remedy that. Their absence from China didn't liberate the Chinese people and their reentry won't either, they need to ignore the hypocrites and do what's best for the company and for the long term they should tweak company culture and make it clear that rank and file employees won't have a say in big picture corporate decisions and planning, they already cost the company dearly and it must not become a habit.
- koboll 8y agoHey Xi, didn't know you were on HN.
- droopyEyelids 8y agoIt's so weird to see people like you write opinions as if you're speaking from a position of authority.
- dang 8y ago> people like you No personal swipes, please. Also, people comment like that on internet message boards all the time; it's basically the default style.
- justinzollars 8y agoIts either "Organizing the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." or its a propaganda machine to maintain its position in the Chinese market (which will be the largest in the world soon). I prefer google stick to its mission and serve the 6 billion of us that require free information to do our jobs.
- hmmm5 8y agoBeing the propaganda machine is the better option because it's going to happen regardless of whether it's Google. Another company will just take Google's place.
- justinzollars 8y agoIf you work at Google and you have participated in this protest: Thank you. You are taking a personal risk but you are absolutely doing the right thing.
- Leary 8y agoI would hope they can sign this letter without incurring "personal risk". Has the environment at Google changed so much that writing letters could risk people's chance at employment?
- bilbo0s 8y agoDepends on what the letter is about. Though this particular issue seems harmless enough.
- wu-ikkyu 8y agoYeah https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Chamber https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_...
- s73v3r_ 8y agoThere's a huge difference between signing a letter arguing against capitulating to state censorship, and authoring a memo using junk science and taking studies way out of context to say that half your coworkers don't deserve to be there.
- shubhamjain 8y agoI am lost at what Google attempts to gain with this. Even if you abide by their rules, I don't think the Chinese Government would be very willing to lose control of a crucial communication medium to a foreign corporation. In the end, they want their companies to win. Then, there's the PR disaster that's bound to come up once it gets official. In a single move, Google would be conveying how far it has moved from its foundational values. I fail to see how this would be a net positive for the company.
- calyth2018 8y agoAs long as most people still use Google for search, and the alternatives aren't comparable, they can continue to move from their "foundational values"
- gaius 8y agoAnd as long as they can recruit candidates, remember. Tho’ it’s not clear where those candidates would go instead, none of the FANG companies have entirely clean hands.
- extralego 8y agoExactly. Consumer activism and job shaming is a moot effort. Useless. What have they ever accomplished? The only way to make a difference here is by standing together.
- thomzi12 8y ago*FAANG
- gaius 8y agoFAANG Maaybe. I'm not sure how this breaks down actually. Obviously Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google (and probably Twitter and a few others) are competing over one pool of candidates. But that that really/fully overlap with the pool that Apple and Microsoft are competing over? But as long as people are beating down the door to get in and look mainly at the free food and massages rather than the "big picture" why would they worry?
- throw7 8y agoreally? google censors content in the u.s. it's called porn.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> google censors content in the u.s. it's called porn. You can turn safe search off in the US.
- hnaccy 8y agoThey still seem to hide things if you compare to Bing results.
- dragonwriter 8y agoAny examples that show this is hiding rather than ranking differences?
- lozaning 8y agoOr you're not giving the Bing team enough credit for their work in porn search, and they're just better at it!
- tmpnam 8y agoIt's even off by default.
- pricees 8y agoNot to be snarky but aren't they censoring at home as well? Whatever you think of Alex Jones or whatever you think you think about him and his ilk, censoring speech is for the feeble minded and tyrannous. Let's leave thought policing to the politicians and the government.
- badrequest 8y agoWhat censorship? When I search for "Alex Jones" on Google, I get...Alex Jones.
- passiveincomelg 8y agoAFAIK he was kicked off Youtube. Which I think is fine and not at odds with supporting free speech.
- yacn 8y agoYoutube doesn't need to support free speech. They're a private company, not the govenrment.
- brain_dev 8y agoSo surely you take no issue with Google developing a search engine that does not support free speech then, either?
- nrb 8y agoThe following are not equal: 1) Google has decided that it does not want this content on their platform. 2) The totalitarian government has decided that nobody can access this content on any platform.
- darpa_escapee 8y agoLet's be clear here, it's not that they don't want content on their platform: it's that content blatantly violates their rules. Encouraging the harassment of families of school shooting victims is pretty heinous, and not something I'd want affiliated with my brand. I also wouldn't want my brand to become a platform for someone who perpetuates conspiracy theories that cause true believes to pick up weapons and become terrorists, simply because that's how he makes a buck. After all, both Google and Twitter have spent close to a decade silencing religious extremists on their platforms. Where were the free speech advocates when fundamentalist Muslims were silenced on Twitter and couldn't use the platform to spread their message?
- headmelted 8y agoI don't see how Google can afford not to do this. I thought the same when they pulled out of China over censorship years ago. Morally, of course its wrong, but what's the alternative over the long term? They would cede the market to a more accomodating competitor (e.g. Baidu), who would then have a strategic advantage. Google's potential market share is (world - China - whichever other country wants to censor them) Google is big. It's not invincible.
- zepto 8y agoA strategic advantage in what way? Unless you assume that Baidu can surplant google in markets other than China. Perhaps that is so, but you need to explain how, given Google’s massive lead everywhere else.
- headmelted 8y agoI doubt very much it'll be Baidu, and maybe what supplants Google doesn't exist yet. Maybe it doesn't happen at all. I just think that with China drawing towards being almost 20% of the population of the entire planet, the government there wields a lot more power globally than they are credited with. A 20% smaller market is a serious disadvantage in the future, and I imagine Google have known this for some time. I think we were all hoping their withdrawal would contribute to an eventual change of the censorship policy, but that hasn't happened, and by all accounts looks less likely now.
- zepto 8y agoA 20% smaller market is only 20% smaller if some entity from China can command more in total. There is no evidence that this Chinese tech companies can operate successfully at Google’s scale without running into their own international barriers.
- zzzcpan 8y ago> but what's the alternative over the long term? Fight censorship, really fight it, and enter all those markets with uncensorable peer-to-peer tech all the way, even replacing money.
- dqpb 8y ago1. Google builds state of the art censored search engine for China 2. China steals source code and gives to Baidu 3. China kicks Google out of China
- danimal88 8y agoThis is the part I don't get. It is my understanding that if you offer an internet service in China, you have to give your source code to the central government. I'm not super well versed on this but would love to learn a bit from someone on HN that understands these requirements in more detail and how google might try and work around them if needed.
- hatergonnahate 8y agoI always find it amusing, give all source code? Google's monorepo store billions of code. Good luck Chinese officials.
- mciak 8y agoWanted to highlight coworker.org here -- worked well for the Maven issue earlier this year
- remusrm 8y agothe hypocrisy is amazing from google and its employees. Censorship is bad in China but no in the bad lands of USA, lol
- InfiniteBeing 8y agoThey don't protest Google's manipulation and censoring of certain Americans though...
- mooman219 8y agoMany of their competitors operate in China to some degree: Yahoo, Bing, even DuckDuckGo until 2014. There's no shifting from values here, Google operated in China until 2010 when it was kicked out, and this is just a move to make it back in. I don't want to be relying on the broken windows fallacy here however. We don't know the extent to which the Chinese government wants Google to comply. Since there are already a bunch of comments speculating the negatives, we can do the same with the positives. Let's look at the potential benefits of existing in China. Results will be censored, there's no getting around that, but unfavorable, yet uncensored, results can be prioritized. Support for Chinese related tools might improve due to the increase in data. Translation could see a quality improvement for one of the most spoken languages in the world. Google may see an increase in revenue, potentially creating more jobs. Ads in China may provide an easier entry way for Americans to advertise there. I'm sure the list goes on.
- goblin89 8y agoThere seems to exist a belief that China kicked Google out of the country at some point. I can’t find a record of even just the Chinese side claiming they have “evicted” Google. Perhaps the “Google doesn’t want to censor; kick Google out” version of events makes more sense with each year just because it’s simpler. It also distorts reality, though, so I think reminding everyone (including myself) the more mainstream timeline is worth a moment. Originally Google China was offering the censored version of search to users within China, which was a controversy. At some point a massive hack targeted Gmail accounts belonging to dissidents and activists of all kinds (from cryptography to Falun Gong religion). Google supposedly could’ve chosen to keep the breach to itself, but did made it public the next year and cited as a reason to reconsider its Chinese operations[0][1]. It’s true that Google’s competitors in search have continued to operate within Chinese market. They have been facing the same issues[2], and by the looks of the history of it many of similar events may well not be publicly known. As of now the only Google service available within mainland China that I know of is Google Translate. I believe it’s made available via servers in China, as the latency seems on par with other local apps. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#Operation_Aurora_and_2010_withdrawal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#Operation_Aurora_... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/nov/14/news.yahoo https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/nov/14/news.yaho...
- matt_s 8y agoI honestly couldn't care less about search results in China. Why aren't they protesting about their technology potentially being abused during election cycles in US? That is something that hits closer to home for me. There is some element of YouTube (and maybe Google Search results) returning things and suggesting things that are intended to lead people towards whomever is paying for those things to float to the top.
- Arubis 8y agoI think this is the third time in as many months I'm reading about Google employees protesting their employer's behavior. One the one hand, it's clearly a good sign that employees are comfortable doing this, as it could guide an enormous company to do better things for the world, and the lack of a contractual Sword of Damocles over their continued employment encourages the free flow of information and conversation. On the other...were the first two times that your employer was found to be engaged in behavior you found to be morally bankrupt not enough? At some point, it's the rule, not the exception.
- h4b4n3r0 8y agoSuch desperate moves on Google’s part do not bode well for the numbers in their next quarterly report. They knew there would be strong blowback, yet they chose to do it anyway. That could mean other ads markets are decelerating, which would be a very bad news indeed for an advertising company like Google which derives 90% of its income from ads. Hence the desperation. Disclaimer: this is all just a conjecture, I do not have any positions in GOOG.
- iforgotpassword 8y agoI don't get why this is such a big thing. I'm not taking any sides here, but what's surprising to me is that I never saw any mention of Microsoft in the comments over the last couple days, when stories about google going into China again hit HN. Nobody seems to care what kind of deals they have with the chinese govt to offer bing, hotmail or plain old windows in China. Have we all just accepted that Microsoft is pure evil and would do anything to make a buck or two? This is in stark contrast with how whenever a google related story hit HN before, everyone was giving them shit in the comments about invading everyone's privacy, collecting data like crazy, closing down every service they ever bought up, improperly implement protocols or create new standards hurting the competition. It sounds like the full "old Microsoft" experience, but now everyone is super surprised and disappointed how they could possibly do this move. I don't get it.
- nrb 8y agoGoogle, by their own admission, was supporting totalitarianism in censoring search results before they decided to stop doing so several years ago. I don't see what Microsoft has to do with holding Google to their own self-established standard of ethics.
- iforgotpassword 8y agoSo you're buying into the story that they only pulled out of China because they didn't want to support censorship anymore. That was merely a PR stunt since they knew that's what would resonate well with Americans or the west in general.* But even then, you're saying that you're totally fine with Microsoft doing this just because they never made a statement saying they don't like censorship? Imo one should judge companies by ones own convictions, at least when it's about fundamental believes of what is right or wrong. I guess I still don't get it. * (primarily because cn gov requested extensive access to their infrastructure, claims of attempted or partially successful break-in attempts, etc. When they ceased all censorship in China the decision was already made to leave, it was just for show.)
- nrb 8y ago
- swerveonem 8y agoDo they protest by not typing? If not, then this is no protest.
- SZJX 8y agoAbsolute BS. Don't Google censor tons of results already according to the US law? Dare they show any pro-ISIS website to the American audience? Dare they stop performing all those DMCA takedowns? What's the fundamental difference between these two? Each country has its own laws regulating the online space and neither China nor the US is an exception to this. I really don't think any of them can offer any sort of convincing response to such questions. Just another display of typical arrogance and double standards that they have long shown, nothing new at all. It's exactly like how people would clamor to censor all sorts of alt-right websites with glee, but defend all Trump-bashing websites to death. It's not that I approve of any alt-right ideology at all, but if they are serious about real "free speech", they need to drop this sort of double standards asap. Otherwise it's just another laughable exercise in hypocrisy and only labeling what helps their own interests as "just", exactly what the US government has been doing overseas in all these decades. Nobody would buy into such nonsense.