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Leaked Transcript Contradicts Google’s Official Story on China

388 points by jbegley 8y ago

cromwellian 8y ago
I'm curious why HN users don't seem to have a problem with Apple censoring the App Store on demand, blocking VPNs and other crypto tools which have real life consequences for some in China. Seems like they get a pass for operating in China (and earning huge yearly revenues from it, which would obviously be threatened if they didn't comply) Is this just a grandfathering in? If Google had never left China and merely obeyed censorship requests in 2010, would people be less upset because they've been acclimatized to it? I don't support Dragonfly, and I do fear the allure of the Chinese market is influencing people to put aside ethical quandaries for revenue growth, but it seems to me that standards are different for different companies.
- LyndsySimon 8y ago
  From my perspective, I don't recall Apple's motto ever being "Don't be evil". I expect Apple to make the call that will generate the most revenue for them as my baseline assumption.
- creaghpatr 8y ago
  The censorship aspect is a red herring. Google is giving the government the infrastructure to identify candidates for "re-education" via their Google searches. Is Apple funneling dissidents to the government via their app store?
  - cromwellian 8y ago
    The answer is, we don't know, Apple is a much more secretive company with far fewer leaks. But Apple does tens of billions in revenue a year in China, and it's entire edifice is built on Chinese manufacturing, and so there is the potential for tremendous leverage by Chinese authorities. If China asked Apple to provide a list of accounts which downloaded VPNs in Xinjiang, are you 100% confident they wouldn't if threatened with sanctions? Perhaps it's even via a plausibly deniable mechanism, like buying keyword targeting on the Chinese app store, and phishing people to fraudulent apps in a 'sting', while you look at other way. There's enough money involved that anyone should seriously question how strong an executive's ethics can be if they've got a $1 trillion market cap to defend. I'm not saying any company is superior to the other, I'm saying the allure of tens of billions of dollars is a powerful motivator for weakening of ethics, and I wouldn't even trust Edward Snowden's ethics if tens of billions was on the line.
    - creaghpatr 8y ago
      I get that you are trying to sow doubt, but consider: >The memo, authored by a Google engineer who was asked to work on the project, disclosed that the search system, codenamed Dragonfly, would require users to log in to perform searches, track their location — and share the resulting history with a Chinese partner who would have “unilateral access” to the data. https://theintercept.com/2018/09/21/google-suppresses-memo-revealing-plans-to-closely-track-search-users-in-china/ https://theintercept.com/2018/09/21/google-suppresses-memo-r... When you discover a memo like that for Apple, feel free to share it with us.
      - cromwellian 8y ago
        We haven't discovered memos like this from Microsoft either, but we know Microsoft works with governments. AT&T installed backdoors for governments, and no memo was leaked. Google is a much more leaky organization, with vocal employees, and not very good at internal compartmentalization, and that's why you know about these things. We used to consider a bug if an employee can't 'see everything' everyone else is working on. Is lack of whistle blowers elsewhere a sign that there's no whistles to blow, or a sign that oppressive security and compartmentalized security at other firms makes it hard for the public to find out? My point is, transparency is good, and that more secrecy doesn't buy you trust. That's why people value open source and used to pretty much rail against closed source HW on HN. Now we seem to be an in era where closed source and locked down DRM app stores that block side loading are accepted.
      - nostrademons 8y ago
        Apple's ethical lapses have all been on the supply-side. Rare-earth mining, contributing to serious environmental problems in China: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/business/global/30rare.html?pagewanted=all https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/business/global/30rare.ht... https://www.cnet.com/news/digging-for-rare-earths-the-mines-where-iphones-are-born/ https://www.cnet.com/news/digging-for-rare-earths-the-mines-... (Apple stopped mining rare-earth minerals in China in 2017, 7 years after the NYTimes story broke.) Child labor, with teenagers working 11-hour days to assemble your iPhone X: https://nypost.com/2017/11/21/apple-has-been-using-teen-labor-to-assemble-the-iphone-x/ https://nypost.com/2017/11/21/apple-has-been-using-teen-labo... Child-labor in the mining of rare-earths: http://fortune.com/2017/03/03/apple-cobalt-child-labor/ http://fortune.com/2017/03/03/apple-cobalt-child-labor/
  - glenrivard 8y ago
    What we know is Apple gave the iCloud data to the China government and removed the VPN software. Versus China government tried to hack Gmail accounts and Google left China and walked from making billions. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/02/5-things-you-need-to-know-about-apple-in-china/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/02/5-things-you-... When Profits Threaten Privacy – 5 Things You Need to Know about ... https://www.ft.com/content/ad42e536-cf36-11e7-b781-794ce08b24dc https://www.ft.com/content/ad42e536-cf36-11e7-b781-794ce08b2... Apple drops hundreds of VPN apps at Beijing's request https://www.androidauthority.com/using-google-fi-in-china-850456/ https://www.androidauthority.com/using-google-fi-in-china-85... Using Project Fi in China: Say goodbye to VPNs - Android Authority
  - darpa_escapee 8y ago
    Apple detects whether a Chinese user uses the Taiwanese flag emoji[1] in order to corrupt its display. Nothing is stopping them from pinging back home when a Chinese citizen says or reads the wrong words. [1] https://9to5mac.com/2018/07/11/apple-china-taiwan-flag/ https://9to5mac.com/2018/07/11/apple-china-taiwan-flag/
    - xvector 8y ago
      But they have not hired a team of 300 engineers to notify the government of the use of the emoji. Apple still uses the Secure Enclave in the iPhone in China. Apple still end-to-end encrypts most data sent to iCloud with the Enclave. Google and Apple's products here are so disparate in how they infringe on user privacy that the comparison isn't even warranted.
      - dmitrygr 8y ago
        iCloud data for Chinese users is stored in China on servers owned by a Chinese company. Chinese law requires this and apple complies.
        xvector 8y ago
        Again, this is irrelevant if the data contained is E2E encrypted by the Secure Enclave.
        dmitrygr 8y ago
        data in iCloud servers is NOT encrypted. Apple has provided it to law enforcement on request. They are quite open about it.
- codezero 8y ago
  If I were to rationalize this, it would be that the App Store is a platform that Apple hosts and curates. Google indexes content that Google does not host or curate outside of responding algorithmically to specific input. I do think if Google hadn't left, it would probably have been more normalized by now. I think I'd be a lot more critical of Apple if, for example, the Chinese government got a special ability to unlock iDevices, if they already have this, I'm not well informed, so feel free to let me know.
  - joshuamorton 8y ago
    Its pretty widely believed that the Chinese government can and has accessed Chinese Citizens' iCloud accounts before [1]. (I work at Google). [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17587304/apple-icloud-china-user-data-state-run-telecom-privacy-security https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17587304/apple-icloud-chi...
    - glenrivard 8y ago
      Why Amnesty International is upset with Apple and the human rights abused with giving the data to the government. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/02/5-things-you-need-to-know-about-apple-in-china/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/02/5-things-you-... When Profits Threaten Privacy – 5 Things You Need to Know about ... But also removing the VPN software. https://www.ft.com/content/ad42e536-cf36-11e7-b781-794ce08b24dc https://www.ft.com/content/ad42e536-cf36-11e7-b781-794ce08b2... Apple drops hundreds of VPN apps at Beijing's request
    - xvector 8y ago
      Quite a bit of data in iCloud is E2E encrypted with device-based Secure Enclave. This doesn't seem like much of an issue.
      - cromwellian 8y ago
        Outside of China yes. If China is asking people to install Jingwangweishi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingwang_Weishi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingwang_Weishi) under threat of fine or jail on Android devices, why do you think they would allow a simple, legal workaround to be "Just buy an iPhone!" That is, China sets up elaborate domestic surveillance, deep packet inspection everywhere, asks citizens to install apps which backdoors their phones to scanning and logging, and all you need to do to thwart it is buy an Apple device? Does that sound like something they would willingly permit? That would be like the US congress passing a law requiring Key Escrow, and every device manufacturer on the market complying, but if you just buy a Xiaomi phone, you can bypass it. How likely do you think there's no special alteration to how iCloud encryption works in China?
- kodablah 8y ago
  > I'm curious why HN users don't seem to have a problem [...] I do and always have. I also have a problem with their silence concerning relinquishing control of iCloud DCs there too. I avoid Apple products due to their anti-developer, opaque, and money-above-all approaches. > it seems to me that standards are different for different companies. Exactly. And countries. So I try not to draw any reaction equivalence except in personal preference. People's outrage is more a product of who they like most at any given time, often driven by narratives in the press/community. All you can do is be consistent with yourself and don't get too whataboutist when these double standards rear their heads.
- ur-whale 8y ago
  Apple has been openly evil for most of its existence. When they keep on being evil (within the boundaries of the law), no one flinches, it's business as usual, and the Apple fanboys keep on submitting to being mistreated by their favorite toy-maker so they can keep on secretly caressing their shiny new Iphones in their bed at night. But back in the days, Google set the moral bar for themselves very, very high. Now that they are openly failing to meet their own standard, the world is sorely disappointed.
- bogomipz 8y ago
  >"I'm curious why HN users don't seem to have a problem with Apple censoring the App Store on demand, blocking VPNs and other crypto tools which have real life consequences for some in China." Pulling an App from the App store is nowhere near the same as building a tool to satisfy the CCP. I get it you're a Google employee and want to defend them but this is nothing more than a red herring and an equivalency fallacy. It sound like you've really drank the Mountain View Kool-aid.
cryoshon 8y ago
looks like the main contradictions are in terms of the scope of the google project (300 employees, full time), the amount the project has been developed already (a very substantial amount), and the awareness of political issues as demonstrated by the leading google employees on the project (more than enough to know they're doing the wrong thing). it also appears as though they are fully conscious of the prospect of social censure: >We are working with you to make sure your careers are not affected by this. so, they know they're clandestinely doing immoral things. but google corporate is determined to protect the minions from the consequences of being identified as an aid to totalitarianism. given that we don't have a list of the google employees working on dragonfly, i think he's just succeeded in tainting the reputation of 100% of googlers and former googlers. any one of them could have been working to keep the chinese oppressed via censorship by knowingly joining a new project designed explicitly to do so.
- defen 8y ago
  > it also appears as though they are fully conscious of the prospect of social censure: >>We are working with you to make sure your careers are not affected by this. I'll tell you how Google is going to spin it (maybe it's true, maybe it's spin, but it's what they're going to say) - If you work on a big project at Google that never gets launched, it affects your ability to move up in the ranks. So he's saying that people working on this aren't going to be "penalized" (passed over for promotion) because the political climate made their project unable to launch. Without that assurance, even if you assume there were no ethical concerns with the project, smart employees would not sign up for it because of the risk of external events preventing its launch.
- berbec 8y ago
  I agree holeheartedly that Google management should be taking major flak for this and turn back from this plan, but I won't paint the engineers working on this as evil. I know the people working as full time engineers aren't living on Ramen noodles and sleeping in boxes, but it's real hard to fight something when your and your family's livelyhood depend on not fighting it. We should champion those willing to take the extraordinary step of walking away, leaking or pushing back on this; while recognizing such actions are extraordinary, and should not be expected of everyone. It would be nice to live in a world where anyone can stand up and fight in this manor, but I just imagine an engineer who really, really can't lose his health insurance and the inner turmoil they go through.
curt15 8y ago
>Gomes referenced the sheer size of the Chinese market, saying “we are talking about the next billion users” for Google. In one word: "profitsssss"
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  I am not defending Google. But, come on, what are they supposed to do? America is all about shareholder value and quarter after quarter after quarter gains. We created this beast. We share in some of the blame.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    They’re supposed to do the right thing even when it costs them, just like the rest of us. They don’t get excused just because they’re incentivized to do the wrong thing. Most of us manage to keep our morals even when it would be to our advantage not to.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Also worth remembering that complaining about this is a very important action. The market is amoral by definition, and values morality only as much as participants demand it to.
      - mikeash 8y ago
        Yes indeed! The answer to “What are they supposed to do?” could be “Realize it will cost them too much due to the backlash.”
    - yayadarsh 8y ago
      This is a misconception. They are not "like the rest of us", in that they are a publicly traded corporation with a legal obligation to chase shareholder value above all else. "We" are private individual citizens.
      - 8y ago
JeremyBanks 8y ago
[deleted]
- opportune 8y ago
  I think this is a pretty good argument in favor of any large enough corporation having its mission become corrupted over time. It is impossible to maintain a certain employee culture over decades of employee turnover and growth, doubly so if you have public shareholders.
opportune 8y ago
Better to be the ones censoring over a billion internet users than to miss out on that sweet sweet profit lol if any of these employees think they will be protected from the repercussions of doing this. I would never hire or want to work with someone with such cheap morals
- AckSyn 8y ago
  Having Google on your resumé used to be a big deal but it's becoming a kind of liability in some circles.
- zethraeus 8y ago
  Realistically, profit seeking corporations would hire them. Insufficiently profit seeking corporations will be out-competed by ones that aren't. They're also not becoming social pariahs outside of, perhaps, the vocal liberal segment of silicon valley. I bet they'll be fine.
  - opportune 8y ago
    There are a much wider group of political views beyond "liberal" where profit-seeking censorship is a bad thing
writepub 8y ago
Google employees' outrage is derailing profits and opportunities at this point. If the protesting employees think they're winning, they're patently wrong. One hiccup in the market, one quarter of slow growth is all it takes for Google to remove obstacles to it's goal. As for shareholders & wall street, if Google continues to display impotence at capturing obvious opportunities, money will move elsewhere, & said slow growth of stock will happen
- kbenson 8y ago
  > Google employees' manufactured outrage Why is it manufactured?
  - writepub 8y ago
    Fair point, edited.
- kopo 8y ago
  Well it's good to see. The transition from the "endless growth" and scale story to a sustainablity story is going to cause major tension given much more than just the financial stakes involved. There is no point talking about controlling the world's temperature if every exec in a corporation is programmed by the stock market to robotically keep things mindlessly scaling. But from experience I also know the exec class when under attack are well trained to just get defensive/batton down the hatches and do nothing. They will change their minds only when everyone is on the same page solution wise. So rather than just be satisfied with the Us Vs them narratives, focus has to shift to solutions. The Chinese have to be pushed to have these discussions in the open about what they want and why it's good.
  - writepub 8y ago
    The Chinese aren't the ones pleading for a Google search solution. They won't talk about squat. Google will, however, need to talk to curious investors on missing billion dollar opportunities while Bing goes about serving search without a fuss in China
PhantomGremlin 8y ago
Here's a summary of the current meaning of "Don't be evil": re. the USA: No, we can't possibly bid on the US Department of Defense cloud computing contract. because the contract may not align with the company’s principles. re. China: Yes, we want to build a censored search engine for Chine because there are a billion potential users there. To me the hypocrisy is astounding. What I don't understand is how Google's employees deal with the cognitive dissonance. I guess they're real good at compartmentalizing.
- phreenet 8y ago
  According to CNN Google just dropped a bid for the DoD Cloud Computing project JEDI https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/09/tech/google-defense-contract/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/09/tech/google-defense-contract/...
  - gaius 8y ago
    ... because they’re technically so far behind AWS and Azure that they aren’t even in the running. They even say they would have bid if it was multicloud so clearly it’s not on ethical grounds really.
- echevil 8y ago
  > What I don't understand is how Google's employees deal with the cognitive dissonance. There are so many Google employees that I won’t expect them to all agree on these things. There are probably enough number of Chinese employees who would want to make such a product
  - topspin 8y ago
    > There are so many Google employees that I won’t expect them to all agree on these things. At some level there are shot callers at Google that simultaneously reject the DOD for "values" and green light Dragonfly. I'm left to wonder how many euphemisms they'll need to employ to obscure their inherently unavoidable facilitation of China's Social Credit System. Good news for Google is they'll be ahead of the curve when the stars eventually align and the establishment gets its opportunity to deal with wrongthinkers in the the US.
barnesto 8y ago
who believes that some version of Dragonfly hasn't been deployed in the US?
- codezero 8y ago
  What search terms do you think are being censored?
  - glup 8y ago
    any word that starts with a minus sign, for one!
    - pgeorgi 8y ago
      'fsck "-v"' and "fsck -v" return significantly different results for me.
      - glup 8y ago
        We should probably tell the EFF that there’s a great way to circumvent Google’s censorship!
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Of course it has. You can't just Google for anything on the internet. Google has already censored child porn for example
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  With the surveillance state we have, fisa courts, along with two corrupt business parties, an almost fully corrupt government, a corrupt military, no doubt. Anyone using Google since it's early days could probably notice a change in 2015 into the 2016 elections, especially how they handle news and looking up news/events that happened in the past. It's not exactly a wild theory. Twitter openly admits to purposeful censorship of hashtags [1]. Make Orwell fiction again. [1] https://archive.is/1qD6n https://archive.is/1qD6n
dqpb 8y ago
I think this is a turning point for Google's dominance in search. While they focus on reducing search quality in order to access more users, somebody out there will focus on improving search quality.
- indigochill 8y ago
  DuckDuckGo is already better than Google in some areas at least. You also have SymbolHound which made it a point to support searching for nonalphanumeric characters.
  - ur-whale 8y ago
    >DuckDuckGo is already better than Google in some areas Mmmh. I do use DuckDuckGo as my main search engine, but I'm sorry to say: I unfortunately have to fall back to Google quite often to find what I'm looking for. I'd be curious to know where they are better than Google.
    - hulahoof 8y ago
      Anything non-localised has been pretty good on DDG recently, much better than a few years ago. I tend to only pull up google for searches like 'XXXXX Opening Hours' and maps related queries nowadays.
  - prolikewh0a 8y ago
    I use DDG and have been starting to fall back to Google less than usual. I think they may be optimizing their search better now? It's a prime time to steal some market share.
    - reustle 8y ago
      After loving Google for years, I've finally migrated over to using Firefox and DDG as my primary daily browser. Slightly painful but I'm getting used to it. I recommend giving it a try.
hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
Wow, reading this article and some of the other linked Intercept articles, in my mind the culture at Google has finally hit a tipping point, having gone full-bore over to the "evil" side. I know most folks on HN will think "Google has been this way for years", but I think the way The Intercept articles describe the erosion of the culture at Google is a perfect template for how virtually all large profit driven companies eventually turn "evil". It's the added secrecy that can be rationalized at first, the stretched gray areas (e.g. "we're just in an exploratory phase") that eventually cross over to full-fledged lies, but you're still able to convince yourself it's just a little "spin" for the greater good. The really hard thing about "not being evil" is that in requires conscious, continuous effort to forgo profit (sometime huge profits) to adhere to that value. The lure of the Chinese market is simply too great, so people convince themselves it's possible to get at that potential market without compromising their values, and they do lots of mental gymnastics trying to get those opposing ideals into congruence. I've seen this pattern many times before, honestly with much lower stakes than what Google is contending with, so I applaud Google for holding out as long as they did. This is one reason I hate talking about "company values": it's easy to adhere to those values when they're not in conflict with the company making money, but the second there is a quarter to hit or a metric at risk, those values always seem to go out the window (or at least get vastly watered down) in the pursuit of profit. I think it's pretty inevitable, and I wish companies would just admit to it.
- harryf 8y ago
  To my mind Google was able to "not evil" while they were the only big player in online ads. Then Facebook showed up and started threatening Googles revenue. They had to play catch up e.g Google Plus and a general race to the bottom ensued.
- mikeash 8y ago
  I think “company values” only makes sense if there’s a solid rationale behind it for how it helps you make money. For example, “don’t cut corners” by itself is easily lost. “Our reputation for high quality products creates loyal customers and allows us to set higher prices” will be more durable. It’s not perfect by any means, but it helps. I don’t recall Google ever having a rationale for how “don't be evil” helped them make money, either explicitly or implicitly. It was just a fun little thing they had.
kodablah 8y ago
> We are working with you to make sure your careers are not affected by this. This is how you can hurt recruitment efforts indirectly. If I, as an employer, avoid Xooglers to make a statement, even if it has no material impact to the actual employment market as a whole, some people will hesitate before working there in the first place. People should work on parts of the company they can brag about shamelessly or any efforts as a tech community to blackball developers of perceived immoral features will expand to developers of entire companies. Similarly, employees of these companies will now have to realize they are judged by the company they keep so to speak. I will say Google employees, compared to other companies, seem to have taken this judgement seriously. Don't think "I didn't work in that area" will save you if "that area" comes to fruition. There is not much pity for employees with other outs/options.
- dixie_land 8y ago
  > If I, as an employer, avoid Xooglers to make a statement You mean the bank statement you have to show your top dollar lawyer to keep him on retainer for the discrimination lawsuits?
  - opportune 8y ago
    Since when is having previously worked at google a protected class?
    - ohithereyou 8y ago
      If I'm a startup and I am looking at two equally situated candidates, and one has Google experience and one does not, then I'm going to hire the one without Google experience every time based on culture fit alone.
  - ohithereyou 8y ago
    I can absolutely refuse to hire an employee because I don't like the college they went to or any business in their employment history. I don't know where you're getting the idea that employers can't use prior employment history to make hiring decisions.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
molticrystal 8y ago
Power Corrupts. Control is Power. They were at one point neutral and uncompromising in their principles even if it excludes them from a market, fighting for freedom of speech and being against censorship, trying to provide the best information whatever it concludes. They now impose their biases, believe the power consumer doesn't know best and thus change the interfaces of their products removing advanced options or open standards, have biases in their search results, and are trying to make the world conform to their ideals where possible, or compromise principles and submit to illiberal societies if it means market access.
- jiveturkey 8y ago
  > believe the power consumer doesn't know best to be fair, often they don't
  - smolder 8y ago
    but then neither does google.
tempodox 8y ago
During the cold war, cozying up to the Russians the way Google is now sucking up to the Chinese would have been rated as treasonous. How times have changed, the almighty dollar sign reigns supreme. (edit: slight change in wording)
- clubm8 8y ago
  >During the cold war, cozying up to the Russians the way Google is now sucking up to the Chinese would have been rated as treason. I am a huge critic of China's human rights record, but "treason" has a very specific legal definition. Doing trade with a country is not "treason".
  - tempodox 8y ago
    What would be a better term in your opinion?
    - mikejb 8y ago
      Doing business? How many US companies do business in China, and have at least some access/collection of Chinese users' data? Are they all traitors?
      - tempodox 8y ago
        I was asking the question in the context of my comparison with the cold war era. Doing business with Russia then wouldn't have been called just “doing business” either, especially if it happened in support of practices diametrically opposed to our own professed values like Democracy and Freedom. How much of a sellout or a cynic do you have to be to call betraying those values for money merely “doing business”? (edit: added last sentence)
        afiler 8y ago
        Even during the cold war, Americans did business with Russia. No large computers or munitions, but Americans still ate Russian caviar. There was this call to boycott it at the same time as the Moscow olympics, but I don't think anyone called it "treason". https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1980/01/31/boycott-caviar/a1768462-9f6a-4f3e-a334-188e7ecd82b8/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1980/01/31/...
gumby 8y ago
On a technical basis I'm surprised this project was / needed to be undertaken at all. What am I missing? The reason for my confusion is that the search engine already implements various "knock out" rules, for example: - it inherently makes a choice as to how to respond to a query based on what it knows about the user ("Tyler" is more likely to refer to "Cowan" for me while "Swift" for the little girl next door). - Though Google has resisted to some degree, it has whole swaths of results which are not permitted in various jurisdictions (various definitions of "hate speech") for example - New "right to be forgotten" restrictions and copyright attacks - "Fake news" attacks and complaints -- spam Given that there have already been implementations (of varying levels of compliance -- I believe many of the censorship demands are intractable) really how would Dragonfly be different? Couldn't a censorship request from CCP use the same API the RIAA does?
baybal2 8y ago
I can confirm that something is definitely going on for sure. Since 2008, google in China were: coding mules, tech support for ad doubleclick, sales for minor 3rd tier products. That was stable for 10 years, but suddenly, since around a year ago, they began to talking about whole new campuses, and rumors began circulating that country's top tier talent is being poached through shell companies by an obscure "internet search startup"
microcolonel 8y ago
I've been saying this for about a year now: Google has lost the will to live, the culture is dying because they are willing to betray their own at a moment's notice, and their first priority is no longer to make money building products people want to use. They would rather spend time engineering their brand image and HR stats than the products which keep them aloft, which is a shame because I have found them to be very generous and competent, and chances they won't be either for long at this rate. You can see this in the quality of most of their products: they're rotting from the inside out, and meanwhile they're being given a fresh coat of paint to distract you from this dereliction.
bordercases 8y ago
If we're worried about one country using a tech corporation's hardware to spy on another, there is in some sense where we're denying the potentially neutral or amoral nature of what it means to be a multinational corporation that needs to consider the costs of operation in many different business environments. We might be unwarranted in our complaints in this regard. At the other extreme, there is the possibility of legitimizing the company that operates in international markets to be aligned with a particular nation's values, and that this alignment is baked into the core of its business operations. This option will probably leave a bad taste in the mouths of some hackers here who resent a consolidation of government power over companies, given that this smells a lot like some other rulerships in history that we frown upon. But I'm unsure if there is a middle ground here. That's my fault if I'm missing it. Can we really hold a global company accountable to our ethical standards, which would not allow them to engage in the moral relativism necessary to access all markets?
ur-whale 8y ago
The Google execs who had big enough balls to walk away from the mountain of cash that the Chinese market represents are all long gone or retired. Larry and Sergei in particular are nowhere to be seen in these discussions. The people left in charge are nowhere near having the kind of backbone and ethics-driven decision making style the top management team had 8-10 years ago. What Google has become in the last 10 years just another boring evil faceless corporation.
- ConceptJunkie 8y ago
  > What Google has become in the last 10 years just another boring evil faceless corporation. Has there ever been a company that made it big, big enough to be in the Apple/Microsoft/IBM/Google class, that didn't become evil? To me, it seems inevitable once a corporation reaches a certain level of success in the market.
  - xvector 8y ago
    Is Apple terribly evil? IMHO they have always had a strong focus on privacy, even in China, and haven't exactly resorted to 'evil' tactics.
dvtrn 8y ago
When pressed to give specific details, Enright refused, saying that he was “not clear on the contours of what is in scope or out of scope for that project.” I'm not sure what is more intellectually offensive: that an executive would say this, or say it and actually believe it would fly. A senior manager? Okay, sure. You might not know what project outside of your division is working on. An executive really shouldn't be this oblivious to their organization working with a foreign government.
- xvector 8y ago
  The intent is to be intellectually offensive. He said it and knew it wouldn't fly. The attitude is "this is none of your business, deny deny deny, what are you gonna do about it?"
djrogers 8y ago
This is insane - for all the folks out there saying that Apple and Amazon’s recent statements have been vague, here’s your first lesson in Dodging 101: > When pressed to give specific details, Enright refused, saying that he was “not clear on the contours of what is in scope or out of scope for that project.” Bravo - you’ve managed to make the parodies of Valley-speak look tame!
iamdave 8y ago
Honest question: Google working on project Dragonfly, a service that-according to the article: 'would blacklist phrases like “human rights,” “student protest,” and “Nobel Prize.”' People are (rightly) bothered by this. Facebook and Twitter tell Alex Jones to pound sand. People argue "Private corporations don't have to give anyone a platform". I'm not here to promote the idea that the members of the first group are automatically members of the second, some overlap could probably be found...probably. Why does the first get so much coverage and ultimately ending up in The Intercept with an inferred tone of apoplectic disappointment-and in some cases-anger towards Google, but coverage of the latter seems to be glee, jubilation and almost schadenfreude? Note that I'm not making any sort of value judgments about Alex Jones' politics or statements, suggesting that I agree with his views, or that even that he may be right about gay frogs (this really shouldn't have to be said, it should be painfully obvious but I'm covering my ass out of trained habit: unless one explicitly says "I am not supporting this person", someone will come out of the woodwork and make the association because it's easier to debate). I'm pointing to actions of corporations and our responses to them: between the two things here, I'm hard pressed to find a difference beyond a matter of scale between what Google is doing and what Facebook and Twitter have already done.
- dumbfoundded 8y ago
  The difference is intolerance. I don't think the problem with Alex Jone's is the subject matter or beliefs but the advocation of violence and spread of intolerance, hate, and misinformation. Freedom of speech is not without reasonable restriction. You cannot yell "fire" in a crowded movie theater without punishment. Silencing Jones on these platforms in my opinion amounts to good housekeeping allowing others to actually express their opinions without manipulation. Part of an intellectually open and honest society is banishing those who seek to manipulate it.
  - adventured 8y ago
    You're conflating two entirely different things. Yelling fire in a crowded theater isn't an issue of speech, that's an act of violence. You're attempting harm upon people. Once you step into the realm of acts of initiating violence, you've crossed out of matters of free speech, they're two different things and must be addressed differently. If I take out a bullhorn and blast it into someone's ear, harming their eardrum, that's also not a matter of speech, it's an act of violence against that person. Holding someone down and painting a swastika on their chest is also not a matter of speech, that too is an act of violence, for the exact same conceptual reason as the bullhorn and yelling fire are. Disgusting speech should be protected. The absolute worst thing you can do, is try to bury that type of speech under laws. The US culture defeated the KKK - which was once large and influential at its peak - precisely because the realm of debate and ideas was firmly held open. Their speech and ideology was not outlawed, their ideas overwhelmingly lost in the public cultural debate. Extremely liberal free speech protections are why the KKK couldn't win then, and haven't managed to resuscitate themselves in the last 30 or 40 years.
gurumeditations 8y ago
Does Google seriously believe the Chinese government will let them threaten Chinese companies? Are they just planning to use it as a window into a more technologically-integrated society to gain an advantage in the West?
- reustle 8y ago
  I'm not very educated on this aspect, but could the US gov potentially be pushing Google to get more involved in China for this reason? More data on their lives.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
krn 8y ago
I don't like the secrecy, but I don't mind Google being in China. Just like with Apple, Chinese people would be better off with censored Google than without it at all.
majia 8y ago
I wonder how people would react to the following situation: There are many Google mirror sites, most of which are currently blocked by China. If the Chinese government decides to work with some of the mirror sites to deliver Google search results in China, on the condition that the mirror sites apply a government filter to the search results, what would happen? I could think of three reactions: 1. Block those mirror sites from accessing Google search results, but this may be difficult since they could just use a different IP address. 2. Do nothing. A censored Google is available in China but people can hardly blame google for not blocking the mirror sites. 3. Work with the mirror sites (for example, require them to display Google ads along with search results).

388 points by jbegley 8y ago

I'm curious why HN users don't seem to have a problem with Apple censoring the App Store on demand, blocking VPNs and other crypto tools which have real life consequences for some in China. Seems like they get a pass for operating in China (and earning huge yearly revenues from it, which would obviously be threatened if they didn't comply) Is this just a grandfathering in? If Google had never left China and merely obeyed censorship requests in 2010, would people be less upset because they've been acclimatized to it? I don't support Dragonfly, and I do fear the allure of the Chinese market is influencing people to put aside ethical quandaries for revenue growth, but it seems to me that standards are different for different companies.

LyndsySimon 8y ago
From my perspective, I don't recall Apple's motto ever being "Don't be evil". I expect Apple to make the call that will generate the most revenue for them as my baseline assumption.
creaghpatr 8y ago
The censorship aspect is a red herring. Google is giving the government the infrastructure to identify candidates for "re-education" via their Google searches. Is Apple funneling dissidents to the government via their app store?
- cromwellian 8y ago
  The answer is, we don't know, Apple is a much more secretive company with far fewer leaks. But Apple does tens of billions in revenue a year in China, and it's entire edifice is built on Chinese manufacturing, and so there is the potential for tremendous leverage by Chinese authorities. If China asked Apple to provide a list of accounts which downloaded VPNs in Xinjiang, are you 100% confident they wouldn't if threatened with sanctions? Perhaps it's even via a plausibly deniable mechanism, like buying keyword targeting on the Chinese app store, and phishing people to fraudulent apps in a 'sting', while you look at other way. There's enough money involved that anyone should seriously question how strong an executive's ethics can be if they've got a $1 trillion market cap to defend. I'm not saying any company is superior to the other, I'm saying the allure of tens of billions of dollars is a powerful motivator for weakening of ethics, and I wouldn't even trust Edward Snowden's ethics if tens of billions was on the line.
  - creaghpatr 8y ago
    I get that you are trying to sow doubt, but consider: >The memo, authored by a Google engineer who was asked to work on the project, disclosed that the search system, codenamed Dragonfly, would require users to log in to perform searches, track their location — and share the resulting history with a Chinese partner who would have “unilateral access” to the data. https://theintercept.com/2018/09/21/google-suppresses-memo-revealing-plans-to-closely-track-search-users-in-china/ https://theintercept.com/2018/09/21/google-suppresses-memo-r... When you discover a memo like that for Apple, feel free to share it with us.
    - cromwellian 8y ago
      We haven't discovered memos like this from Microsoft either, but we know Microsoft works with governments. AT&T installed backdoors for governments, and no memo was leaked. Google is a much more leaky organization, with vocal employees, and not very good at internal compartmentalization, and that's why you know about these things. We used to consider a bug if an employee can't 'see everything' everyone else is working on. Is lack of whistle blowers elsewhere a sign that there's no whistles to blow, or a sign that oppressive security and compartmentalized security at other firms makes it hard for the public to find out? My point is, transparency is good, and that more secrecy doesn't buy you trust. That's why people value open source and used to pretty much rail against closed source HW on HN. Now we seem to be an in era where closed source and locked down DRM app stores that block side loading are accepted.
    - nostrademons 8y ago
      Apple's ethical lapses have all been on the supply-side. Rare-earth mining, contributing to serious environmental problems in China: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/business/global/30rare.html?pagewanted=all https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/business/global/30rare.ht... https://www.cnet.com/news/digging-for-rare-earths-the-mines-where-iphones-are-born/ https://www.cnet.com/news/digging-for-rare-earths-the-mines-... (Apple stopped mining rare-earth minerals in China in 2017, 7 years after the NYTimes story broke.) Child labor, with teenagers working 11-hour days to assemble your iPhone X: https://nypost.com/2017/11/21/apple-has-been-using-teen-labor-to-assemble-the-iphone-x/ https://nypost.com/2017/11/21/apple-has-been-using-teen-labo... Child-labor in the mining of rare-earths: http://fortune.com/2017/03/03/apple-cobalt-child-labor/ http://fortune.com/2017/03/03/apple-cobalt-child-labor/
- glenrivard 8y ago
  What we know is Apple gave the iCloud data to the China government and removed the VPN software. Versus China government tried to hack Gmail accounts and Google left China and walked from making billions. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/02/5-things-you-need-to-know-about-apple-in-china/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/02/5-things-you-... When Profits Threaten Privacy – 5 Things You Need to Know about ... https://www.ft.com/content/ad42e536-cf36-11e7-b781-794ce08b24dc https://www.ft.com/content/ad42e536-cf36-11e7-b781-794ce08b2... Apple drops hundreds of VPN apps at Beijing's request https://www.androidauthority.com/using-google-fi-in-china-850456/ https://www.androidauthority.com/using-google-fi-in-china-85... Using Project Fi in China: Say goodbye to VPNs - Android Authority
- darpa_escapee 8y ago
  Apple detects whether a Chinese user uses the Taiwanese flag emoji[1] in order to corrupt its display. Nothing is stopping them from pinging back home when a Chinese citizen says or reads the wrong words. [1] https://9to5mac.com/2018/07/11/apple-china-taiwan-flag/ https://9to5mac.com/2018/07/11/apple-china-taiwan-flag/
  - xvector 8y ago
    But they have not hired a team of 300 engineers to notify the government of the use of the emoji. Apple still uses the Secure Enclave in the iPhone in China. Apple still end-to-end encrypts most data sent to iCloud with the Enclave. Google and Apple's products here are so disparate in how they infringe on user privacy that the comparison isn't even warranted.
    - dmitrygr 8y ago
      iCloud data for Chinese users is stored in China on servers owned by a Chinese company. Chinese law requires this and apple complies.
      - xvector 8y ago
        Again, this is irrelevant if the data contained is E2E encrypted by the Secure Enclave.
        dmitrygr 8y ago
        data in iCloud servers is NOT encrypted. Apple has provided it to law enforcement on request. They are quite open about it.
codezero 8y ago
If I were to rationalize this, it would be that the App Store is a platform that Apple hosts and curates. Google indexes content that Google does not host or curate outside of responding algorithmically to specific input. I do think if Google hadn't left, it would probably have been more normalized by now. I think I'd be a lot more critical of Apple if, for example, the Chinese government got a special ability to unlock iDevices, if they already have this, I'm not well informed, so feel free to let me know.
- joshuamorton 8y ago
  Its pretty widely believed that the Chinese government can and has accessed Chinese Citizens' iCloud accounts before [1]. (I work at Google). [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17587304/apple-icloud-china-user-data-state-run-telecom-privacy-security https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17587304/apple-icloud-chi...
  - glenrivard 8y ago
    Why Amnesty International is upset with Apple and the human rights abused with giving the data to the government. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/02/5-things-you-need-to-know-about-apple-in-china/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/02/5-things-you-... When Profits Threaten Privacy – 5 Things You Need to Know about ... But also removing the VPN software. https://www.ft.com/content/ad42e536-cf36-11e7-b781-794ce08b24dc https://www.ft.com/content/ad42e536-cf36-11e7-b781-794ce08b2... Apple drops hundreds of VPN apps at Beijing's request
  - xvector 8y ago
    Quite a bit of data in iCloud is E2E encrypted with device-based Secure Enclave. This doesn't seem like much of an issue.
    - cromwellian 8y ago
      Outside of China yes. If China is asking people to install Jingwangweishi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingwang_Weishi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingwang_Weishi) under threat of fine or jail on Android devices, why do you think they would allow a simple, legal workaround to be "Just buy an iPhone!" That is, China sets up elaborate domestic surveillance, deep packet inspection everywhere, asks citizens to install apps which backdoors their phones to scanning and logging, and all you need to do to thwart it is buy an Apple device? Does that sound like something they would willingly permit? That would be like the US congress passing a law requiring Key Escrow, and every device manufacturer on the market complying, but if you just buy a Xiaomi phone, you can bypass it. How likely do you think there's no special alteration to how iCloud encryption works in China?
kodablah 8y ago
> I'm curious why HN users don't seem to have a problem [...] I do and always have. I also have a problem with their silence concerning relinquishing control of iCloud DCs there too. I avoid Apple products due to their anti-developer, opaque, and money-above-all approaches. > it seems to me that standards are different for different companies. Exactly. And countries. So I try not to draw any reaction equivalence except in personal preference. People's outrage is more a product of who they like most at any given time, often driven by narratives in the press/community. All you can do is be consistent with yourself and don't get too whataboutist when these double standards rear their heads.
ur-whale 8y ago
Apple has been openly evil for most of its existence. When they keep on being evil (within the boundaries of the law), no one flinches, it's business as usual, and the Apple fanboys keep on submitting to being mistreated by their favorite toy-maker so they can keep on secretly caressing their shiny new Iphones in their bed at night. But back in the days, Google set the moral bar for themselves very, very high. Now that they are openly failing to meet their own standard, the world is sorely disappointed.
bogomipz 8y ago
>"I'm curious why HN users don't seem to have a problem with Apple censoring the App Store on demand, blocking VPNs and other crypto tools which have real life consequences for some in China." Pulling an App from the App store is nowhere near the same as building a tool to satisfy the CCP. I get it you're a Google employee and want to defend them but this is nothing more than a red herring and an equivalency fallacy. It sound like you've really drank the Mountain View Kool-aid.

cryoshon 8y ago

looks like the main contradictions are in terms of the scope of the google project (300 employees, full time), the amount the project has been developed already (a very substantial amount), and the awareness of political issues as demonstrated by the leading google employees on the project (more than enough to know they're doing the wrong thing). it also appears as though they are fully conscious of the prospect of social censure: >We are working with you to make sure your careers are not affected by this. so, they know they're clandestinely doing immoral things. but google corporate is determined to protect the minions from the consequences of being identified as an aid to totalitarianism. given that we don't have a list of the google employees working on dragonfly, i think he's just succeeded in tainting the reputation of 100% of googlers and former googlers. any one of them could have been working to keep the chinese oppressed via censorship by knowingly joining a new project designed explicitly to do so.

defen 8y ago
> it also appears as though they are fully conscious of the prospect of social censure: >>We are working with you to make sure your careers are not affected by this. I'll tell you how Google is going to spin it (maybe it's true, maybe it's spin, but it's what they're going to say) - If you work on a big project at Google that never gets launched, it affects your ability to move up in the ranks. So he's saying that people working on this aren't going to be "penalized" (passed over for promotion) because the political climate made their project unable to launch. Without that assurance, even if you assume there were no ethical concerns with the project, smart employees would not sign up for it because of the risk of external events preventing its launch.
berbec 8y ago
I agree holeheartedly that Google management should be taking major flak for this and turn back from this plan, but I won't paint the engineers working on this as evil. I know the people working as full time engineers aren't living on Ramen noodles and sleeping in boxes, but it's real hard to fight something when your and your family's livelyhood depend on not fighting it. We should champion those willing to take the extraordinary step of walking away, leaking or pushing back on this; while recognizing such actions are extraordinary, and should not be expected of everyone. It would be nice to live in a world where anyone can stand up and fight in this manor, but I just imagine an engineer who really, really can't lose his health insurance and the inner turmoil they go through.

curt15 8y ago

>Gomes referenced the sheer size of the Chinese market, saying “we are talking about the next billion users” for Google. In one word: "profitsssss"

JustSomeNobody 8y ago
I am not defending Google. But, come on, what are they supposed to do? America is all about shareholder value and quarter after quarter after quarter gains. We created this beast. We share in some of the blame.
- mikeash 8y ago
  They’re supposed to do the right thing even when it costs them, just like the rest of us. They don’t get excused just because they’re incentivized to do the wrong thing. Most of us manage to keep our morals even when it would be to our advantage not to.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Also worth remembering that complaining about this is a very important action. The market is amoral by definition, and values morality only as much as participants demand it to.
    - mikeash 8y ago
      Yes indeed! The answer to “What are they supposed to do?” could be “Realize it will cost them too much due to the backlash.”
  - yayadarsh 8y ago
    This is a misconception. They are not "like the rest of us", in that they are a publicly traded corporation with a legal obligation to chase shareholder value above all else. "We" are private individual citizens.
    - 8y ago

JeremyBanks 8y ago

[deleted]

opportune 8y ago
I think this is a pretty good argument in favor of any large enough corporation having its mission become corrupted over time. It is impossible to maintain a certain employee culture over decades of employee turnover and growth, doubly so if you have public shareholders.

opportune 8y ago

Better to be the ones censoring over a billion internet users than to miss out on that sweet sweet profit lol if any of these employees think they will be protected from the repercussions of doing this. I would never hire or want to work with someone with such cheap morals

AckSyn 8y ago
Having Google on your resumé used to be a big deal but it's becoming a kind of liability in some circles.
zethraeus 8y ago
Realistically, profit seeking corporations would hire them. Insufficiently profit seeking corporations will be out-competed by ones that aren't. They're also not becoming social pariahs outside of, perhaps, the vocal liberal segment of silicon valley. I bet they'll be fine.
- opportune 8y ago
  There are a much wider group of political views beyond "liberal" where profit-seeking censorship is a bad thing

writepub 8y ago

Google employees' outrage is derailing profits and opportunities at this point. If the protesting employees think they're winning, they're patently wrong. One hiccup in the market, one quarter of slow growth is all it takes for Google to remove obstacles to it's goal. As for shareholders & wall street, if Google continues to display impotence at capturing obvious opportunities, money will move elsewhere, & said slow growth of stock will happen

kbenson 8y ago
> Google employees' manufactured outrage Why is it manufactured?
- writepub 8y ago
  Fair point, edited.
kopo 8y ago
Well it's good to see. The transition from the "endless growth" and scale story to a sustainablity story is going to cause major tension given much more than just the financial stakes involved. There is no point talking about controlling the world's temperature if every exec in a corporation is programmed by the stock market to robotically keep things mindlessly scaling. But from experience I also know the exec class when under attack are well trained to just get defensive/batton down the hatches and do nothing. They will change their minds only when everyone is on the same page solution wise. So rather than just be satisfied with the Us Vs them narratives, focus has to shift to solutions. The Chinese have to be pushed to have these discussions in the open about what they want and why it's good.
- writepub 8y ago
  The Chinese aren't the ones pleading for a Google search solution. They won't talk about squat. Google will, however, need to talk to curious investors on missing billion dollar opportunities while Bing goes about serving search without a fuss in China

PhantomGremlin 8y ago

Here's a summary of the current meaning of "Don't be evil": re. the USA: No, we can't possibly bid on the US Department of Defense cloud computing contract. because the contract may not align with the company’s principles. re. China: Yes, we want to build a censored search engine for Chine because there are a billion potential users there. To me the hypocrisy is astounding. What I don't understand is how Google's employees deal with the cognitive dissonance. I guess they're real good at compartmentalizing.

phreenet 8y ago
According to CNN Google just dropped a bid for the DoD Cloud Computing project JEDI https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/09/tech/google-defense-contract/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/09/tech/google-defense-contract/...
- gaius 8y ago
  ... because they’re technically so far behind AWS and Azure that they aren’t even in the running. They even say they would have bid if it was multicloud so clearly it’s not on ethical grounds really.
echevil 8y ago
> What I don't understand is how Google's employees deal with the cognitive dissonance. There are so many Google employees that I won’t expect them to all agree on these things. There are probably enough number of Chinese employees who would want to make such a product
- topspin 8y ago
  > There are so many Google employees that I won’t expect them to all agree on these things. At some level there are shot callers at Google that simultaneously reject the DOD for "values" and green light Dragonfly. I'm left to wonder how many euphemisms they'll need to employ to obscure their inherently unavoidable facilitation of China's Social Credit System. Good news for Google is they'll be ahead of the curve when the stars eventually align and the establishment gets its opportunity to deal with wrongthinkers in the the US.

barnesto 8y ago

who believes that some version of Dragonfly hasn't been deployed in the US?

codezero 8y ago
What search terms do you think are being censored?
- glup 8y ago
  any word that starts with a minus sign, for one!
  - pgeorgi 8y ago
    'fsck "-v"' and "fsck -v" return significantly different results for me.
    - glup 8y ago
      We should probably tell the EFF that there’s a great way to circumvent Google’s censorship!
oh_sigh 8y ago
Of course it has. You can't just Google for anything on the internet. Google has already censored child porn for example
prolikewh0a 8y ago
With the surveillance state we have, fisa courts, along with two corrupt business parties, an almost fully corrupt government, a corrupt military, no doubt. Anyone using Google since it's early days could probably notice a change in 2015 into the 2016 elections, especially how they handle news and looking up news/events that happened in the past. It's not exactly a wild theory. Twitter openly admits to purposeful censorship of hashtags [1]. Make Orwell fiction again. [1] https://archive.is/1qD6n https://archive.is/1qD6n

dqpb 8y ago

I think this is a turning point for Google's dominance in search. While they focus on reducing search quality in order to access more users, somebody out there will focus on improving search quality.

indigochill 8y ago
DuckDuckGo is already better than Google in some areas at least. You also have SymbolHound which made it a point to support searching for nonalphanumeric characters.
- ur-whale 8y ago
  >DuckDuckGo is already better than Google in some areas Mmmh. I do use DuckDuckGo as my main search engine, but I'm sorry to say: I unfortunately have to fall back to Google quite often to find what I'm looking for. I'd be curious to know where they are better than Google.
  - hulahoof 8y ago
    Anything non-localised has been pretty good on DDG recently, much better than a few years ago. I tend to only pull up google for searches like 'XXXXX Opening Hours' and maps related queries nowadays.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  I use DDG and have been starting to fall back to Google less than usual. I think they may be optimizing their search better now? It's a prime time to steal some market share.
  - reustle 8y ago
    After loving Google for years, I've finally migrated over to using Firefox and DDG as my primary daily browser. Slightly painful but I'm getting used to it. I recommend giving it a try.

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago

Wow, reading this article and some of the other linked Intercept articles, in my mind the culture at Google has finally hit a tipping point, having gone full-bore over to the "evil" side. I know most folks on HN will think "Google has been this way for years", but I think the way The Intercept articles describe the erosion of the culture at Google is a perfect template for how virtually all large profit driven companies eventually turn "evil". It's the added secrecy that can be rationalized at first, the stretched gray areas (e.g. "we're just in an exploratory phase") that eventually cross over to full-fledged lies, but you're still able to convince yourself it's just a little "spin" for the greater good. The really hard thing about "not being evil" is that in requires conscious, continuous effort to forgo profit (sometime huge profits) to adhere to that value. The lure of the Chinese market is simply too great, so people convince themselves it's possible to get at that potential market without compromising their values, and they do lots of mental gymnastics trying to get those opposing ideals into congruence. I've seen this pattern many times before, honestly with much lower stakes than what Google is contending with, so I applaud Google for holding out as long as they did. This is one reason I hate talking about "company values": it's easy to adhere to those values when they're not in conflict with the company making money, but the second there is a quarter to hit or a metric at risk, those values always seem to go out the window (or at least get vastly watered down) in the pursuit of profit. I think it's pretty inevitable, and I wish companies would just admit to it.

harryf 8y ago
To my mind Google was able to "not evil" while they were the only big player in online ads. Then Facebook showed up and started threatening Googles revenue. They had to play catch up e.g Google Plus and a general race to the bottom ensued.
mikeash 8y ago
I think “company values” only makes sense if there’s a solid rationale behind it for how it helps you make money. For example, “don’t cut corners” by itself is easily lost. “Our reputation for high quality products creates loyal customers and allows us to set higher prices” will be more durable. It’s not perfect by any means, but it helps. I don’t recall Google ever having a rationale for how “don't be evil” helped them make money, either explicitly or implicitly. It was just a fun little thing they had.

kodablah 8y ago

> We are working with you to make sure your careers are not affected by this. This is how you can hurt recruitment efforts indirectly. If I, as an employer, avoid Xooglers to make a statement, even if it has no material impact to the actual employment market as a whole, some people will hesitate before working there in the first place. People should work on parts of the company they can brag about shamelessly or any efforts as a tech community to blackball developers of perceived immoral features will expand to developers of entire companies. Similarly, employees of these companies will now have to realize they are judged by the company they keep so to speak. I will say Google employees, compared to other companies, seem to have taken this judgement seriously. Don't think "I didn't work in that area" will save you if "that area" comes to fruition. There is not much pity for employees with other outs/options.

dixie_land 8y ago
> If I, as an employer, avoid Xooglers to make a statement You mean the bank statement you have to show your top dollar lawyer to keep him on retainer for the discrimination lawsuits?
- opportune 8y ago
  Since when is having previously worked at google a protected class?
  - ohithereyou 8y ago
    If I'm a startup and I am looking at two equally situated candidates, and one has Google experience and one does not, then I'm going to hire the one without Google experience every time based on culture fit alone.
- ohithereyou 8y ago
  I can absolutely refuse to hire an employee because I don't like the college they went to or any business in their employment history. I don't know where you're getting the idea that employers can't use prior employment history to make hiring decisions.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

molticrystal 8y ago

Power Corrupts. Control is Power. They were at one point neutral and uncompromising in their principles even if it excludes them from a market, fighting for freedom of speech and being against censorship, trying to provide the best information whatever it concludes. They now impose their biases, believe the power consumer doesn't know best and thus change the interfaces of their products removing advanced options or open standards, have biases in their search results, and are trying to make the world conform to their ideals where possible, or compromise principles and submit to illiberal societies if it means market access.

jiveturkey 8y ago
> believe the power consumer doesn't know best to be fair, often they don't
- smolder 8y ago
  but then neither does google.

tempodox 8y ago

During the cold war, cozying up to the Russians the way Google is now sucking up to the Chinese would have been rated as treasonous. How times have changed, the almighty dollar sign reigns supreme. (edit: slight change in wording)

clubm8 8y ago
>During the cold war, cozying up to the Russians the way Google is now sucking up to the Chinese would have been rated as treason. I am a huge critic of China's human rights record, but "treason" has a very specific legal definition. Doing trade with a country is not "treason".
- tempodox 8y ago
  What would be a better term in your opinion?
  - mikejb 8y ago
    Doing business? How many US companies do business in China, and have at least some access/collection of Chinese users' data? Are they all traitors?
    - tempodox 8y ago
      I was asking the question in the context of my comparison with the cold war era. Doing business with Russia then wouldn't have been called just “doing business” either, especially if it happened in support of practices diametrically opposed to our own professed values like Democracy and Freedom. How much of a sellout or a cynic do you have to be to call betraying those values for money merely “doing business”? (edit: added last sentence)
      - afiler 8y ago
        Even during the cold war, Americans did business with Russia. No large computers or munitions, but Americans still ate Russian caviar. There was this call to boycott it at the same time as the Moscow olympics, but I don't think anyone called it "treason". https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1980/01/31/boycott-caviar/a1768462-9f6a-4f3e-a334-188e7ecd82b8/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1980/01/31/...

gumby 8y ago

On a technical basis I'm surprised this project was / needed to be undertaken at all. What am I missing? The reason for my confusion is that the search engine already implements various "knock out" rules, for example: - it inherently makes a choice as to how to respond to a query based on what it knows about the user ("Tyler" is more likely to refer to "Cowan" for me while "Swift" for the little girl next door). - Though Google has resisted to some degree, it has whole swaths of results which are not permitted in various jurisdictions (various definitions of "hate speech") for example - New "right to be forgotten" restrictions and copyright attacks - "Fake news" attacks and complaints -- spam Given that there have already been implementations (of varying levels of compliance -- I believe many of the censorship demands are intractable) really how would Dragonfly be different? Couldn't a censorship request from CCP use the same API the RIAA does?

baybal2 8y ago

I can confirm that something is definitely going on for sure. Since 2008, google in China were: coding mules, tech support for ad doubleclick, sales for minor 3rd tier products. That was stable for 10 years, but suddenly, since around a year ago, they began to talking about whole new campuses, and rumors began circulating that country's top tier talent is being poached through shell companies by an obscure "internet search startup"

microcolonel 8y ago

I've been saying this for about a year now: Google has lost the will to live, the culture is dying because they are willing to betray their own at a moment's notice, and their first priority is no longer to make money building products people want to use. They would rather spend time engineering their brand image and HR stats than the products which keep them aloft, which is a shame because I have found them to be very generous and competent, and chances they won't be either for long at this rate. You can see this in the quality of most of their products: they're rotting from the inside out, and meanwhile they're being given a fresh coat of paint to distract you from this dereliction.

bordercases 8y ago

If we're worried about one country using a tech corporation's hardware to spy on another, there is in some sense where we're denying the potentially neutral or amoral nature of what it means to be a multinational corporation that needs to consider the costs of operation in many different business environments. We might be unwarranted in our complaints in this regard. At the other extreme, there is the possibility of legitimizing the company that operates in international markets to be aligned with a particular nation's values, and that this alignment is baked into the core of its business operations. This option will probably leave a bad taste in the mouths of some hackers here who resent a consolidation of government power over companies, given that this smells a lot like some other rulerships in history that we frown upon. But I'm unsure if there is a middle ground here. That's my fault if I'm missing it. Can we really hold a global company accountable to our ethical standards, which would not allow them to engage in the moral relativism necessary to access all markets?

ur-whale 8y ago

The Google execs who had big enough balls to walk away from the mountain of cash that the Chinese market represents are all long gone or retired. Larry and Sergei in particular are nowhere to be seen in these discussions. The people left in charge are nowhere near having the kind of backbone and ethics-driven decision making style the top management team had 8-10 years ago. What Google has become in the last 10 years just another boring evil faceless corporation.

ConceptJunkie 8y ago
> What Google has become in the last 10 years just another boring evil faceless corporation. Has there ever been a company that made it big, big enough to be in the Apple/Microsoft/IBM/Google class, that didn't become evil? To me, it seems inevitable once a corporation reaches a certain level of success in the market.
- xvector 8y ago
  Is Apple terribly evil? IMHO they have always had a strong focus on privacy, even in China, and haven't exactly resorted to 'evil' tactics.

dvtrn 8y ago

When pressed to give specific details, Enright refused, saying that he was “not clear on the contours of what is in scope or out of scope for that project.” I'm not sure what is more intellectually offensive: that an executive would say this, or say it and actually believe it would fly. A senior manager? Okay, sure. You might not know what project outside of your division is working on. An executive really shouldn't be this oblivious to their organization working with a foreign government.

xvector 8y ago
The intent is to be intellectually offensive. He said it and knew it wouldn't fly. The attitude is "this is none of your business, deny deny deny, what are you gonna do about it?"

djrogers 8y ago

This is insane - for all the folks out there saying that Apple and Amazon’s recent statements have been vague, here’s your first lesson in Dodging 101: > When pressed to give specific details, Enright refused, saying that he was “not clear on the contours of what is in scope or out of scope for that project.” Bravo - you’ve managed to make the parodies of Valley-speak look tame!

iamdave 8y ago

Honest question: Google working on project Dragonfly, a service that-according to the article: 'would blacklist phrases like “human rights,” “student protest,” and “Nobel Prize.”' People are (rightly) bothered by this. Facebook and Twitter tell Alex Jones to pound sand. People argue "Private corporations don't have to give anyone a platform". I'm not here to promote the idea that the members of the first group are automatically members of the second, some overlap could probably be found...probably. Why does the first get so much coverage and ultimately ending up in The Intercept with an inferred tone of apoplectic disappointment-and in some cases-anger towards Google, but coverage of the latter seems to be glee, jubilation and almost schadenfreude? Note that I'm not making any sort of value judgments about Alex Jones' politics or statements, suggesting that I agree with his views, or that even that he may be right about gay frogs (this really shouldn't have to be said, it should be painfully obvious but I'm covering my ass out of trained habit: unless one explicitly says "I am not supporting this person", someone will come out of the woodwork and make the association because it's easier to debate). I'm pointing to actions of corporations and our responses to them: between the two things here, I'm hard pressed to find a difference beyond a matter of scale between what Google is doing and what Facebook and Twitter have already done.

dumbfoundded 8y ago
The difference is intolerance. I don't think the problem with Alex Jone's is the subject matter or beliefs but the advocation of violence and spread of intolerance, hate, and misinformation. Freedom of speech is not without reasonable restriction. You cannot yell "fire" in a crowded movie theater without punishment. Silencing Jones on these platforms in my opinion amounts to good housekeeping allowing others to actually express their opinions without manipulation. Part of an intellectually open and honest society is banishing those who seek to manipulate it.
- adventured 8y ago
  You're conflating two entirely different things. Yelling fire in a crowded theater isn't an issue of speech, that's an act of violence. You're attempting harm upon people. Once you step into the realm of acts of initiating violence, you've crossed out of matters of free speech, they're two different things and must be addressed differently. If I take out a bullhorn and blast it into someone's ear, harming their eardrum, that's also not a matter of speech, it's an act of violence against that person. Holding someone down and painting a swastika on their chest is also not a matter of speech, that too is an act of violence, for the exact same conceptual reason as the bullhorn and yelling fire are. Disgusting speech should be protected. The absolute worst thing you can do, is try to bury that type of speech under laws. The US culture defeated the KKK - which was once large and influential at its peak - precisely because the realm of debate and ideas was firmly held open. Their speech and ideology was not outlawed, their ideas overwhelmingly lost in the public cultural debate. Extremely liberal free speech protections are why the KKK couldn't win then, and haven't managed to resuscitate themselves in the last 30 or 40 years.

gurumeditations 8y ago

Does Google seriously believe the Chinese government will let them threaten Chinese companies? Are they just planning to use it as a window into a more technologically-integrated society to gain an advantage in the West?

reustle 8y ago
I'm not very educated on this aspect, but could the US gov potentially be pushing Google to get more involved in China for this reason? More data on their lives.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

krn 8y ago

I don't like the secrecy, but I don't mind Google being in China. Just like with Apple, Chinese people would be better off with censored Google than without it at all.

majia 8y ago

I wonder how people would react to the following situation: There are many Google mirror sites, most of which are currently blocked by China. If the Chinese government decides to work with some of the mirror sites to deliver Google search results in China, on the condition that the mirror sites apply a government filter to the search results, what would happen? I could think of three reactions: 1. Block those mirror sites from accessing Google search results, but this may be difficult since they could just use a different IP address. 2. Do nothing. A censored Google is available in China but people can hardly blame google for not blocking the mirror sites. 3. Work with the mirror sites (for example, require them to display Google ads along with search results).